Flood Season
by DezoPenguin
Summary: A mission to Ragol results in a shocking death that makes hunters Lyon and Ryland determined to seek the truth. A secret Lab project, the machinations of the military, and chaos in the Administration over the push for Pioneer 2 to seek independence all place the hunters at ground zero for a cleansing tide in this conclusion to the Holiday Stories series.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: I wrote the first Lyon and Ryland Holiday Fic ("Trick or Treat," although "The Year of the Rappy" is actually the first in the internal chronology) back in October of 2006. At that time, it wasn't meant to become a series; I just liked the orange-and-black color set for a RAcaseal and thought it would be a cute image to have a holographic pumpkin fall on one. Things kind of spiraled outwards from there. I liked the characters, and I conceived of the idea of doing a series with them. Since the first story featured Halloween, it was natural to do stories featuring the other holidays that the PSO servers would celebrate, as a kind of theme. So thence followed Valentine's Day, White Day, New Year's Day, and Christmas...and now, at long last, the final story in the series, with Easter. I actually wrote the story last year (2015), but I felt that it didn't make any sense to "publish" it in late summer, so I decided to hold on to it until this year. So here, nine and a half years later, the series finally concludes. Hope you enjoy it!_

 **AUW 3087, April**

"Target: acquired."

"Thanks, Gowan; I see him," Android Weinstine Co. Type L/Y-906 (Lyon, to those interested in saving nine syllables) said over the communications link. "He's approaching my position from the west, coming in just north of the rock formation."

"Damn, I can't see him," spoke up one of the organic members of the hunter team. Naomi was a Newman, one of the genetically engineered race built to emphasize agility and, more significantly, manipulation of Photon energy through the so-called psychic techniques. She had turned up her nose at that design concept, though; as a Hunter her training was primarily focused on hand-to-hand combat.

Lyon could appreciate Naomi's attitude. She herself was a RAcaseal, her combat programming and body structure optimized for long-range encounters, but her personal preference was to operate in the front lines. She wasn't sure if the phrase "biology is not destiny" could be applied to someone who didn't actually _have_ biology, but the underlying principle applied.

"I have him on my nav-unit's radar," the final member of the group spoke up. Donovan Ryland was the only full human of the bunch, and as a Force was the one who offered support through technique use. "Try to drive him north towards Naomi's and my positions. Lyon, you're going to need to cut him off from the way he came, so let him get past you."

"Copy that."

"Plan: acknowledged," Gowan echoed. His speech processor had been damaged by an online virus, resulting in his unusual mode of expression.

Lyon settled herself into the absolute stillness of pose that only an android could manage, not even the shallowest breathing to create a flicker of motion to give her away. She wished that it was after dark, so that her orange-and-black carapace would better blend in; she would have to hope the lush greenery of this mountainous area of Gal Da Val Island was enough to disguise her until her quarry had passed by. She watched on her navigation radar screen as the mark indicating the target continued to approach, then passed by north of her hiding place so that she could get her first good look at him.

In the flesh, Selfas Kane did not closely resemble the video images of him that they'd been shown. His blond hair was worn in a cluster of spikes, and a wraparound visor covered the upper half of his face, giving him an almost mechanical look that Lyon could not help but admire (being perfectly happy to be an android, it made sense to her that organics would want to emulate robots and androids in various ways). His body, already thick and muscular, was made even more so by the bulky, built-up armor he wore; it lacked the exaggerated torso plating human Rangers favored but the shoulder guards made him vaguely resemble Gowan, who was so huge that he looked more like an artillery unit with humanoid design than an actual person.

It was Kane, though; Lyon's visual comparison functions were quite able to adapt to the differences.

"He's in position," she said.

In the next instant, the sound of gunfire rang out. Shots from Gowan's Photon rifle tore into the earth at Kane's feet, no more than a meter away. An experienced Hunter, Kane reacted at once to being caught out, open and exposed. A handgun flashed into his grip in case he needed to return fire, and he was on the move at once, zigzagging to make it harder for the sniper to acquire a target.

Lyon was on the move then, too, stepping out from cover with her Varista drawn. The high-powered handgun not only was there to dissuade Kane from trying to shoot her down, as he might have considered if she'd only had a hand-to-hand weapon equipped, but it also had an integrated unit capable of inducing neural paralysis with a shot. She fired twice, the first shot a clean miss while the second took Kane in the side. He didn't freeze up, though, so either the paralysis had just failed or his armor was augmented with a unit to resist such effects.

Though the shots didn't stop him, they _did_ cause him to change course. He swiveled hard to his right and continued to zigzag, but this time towards the north, just as they'd planned it.

He was running uphill, now, Gowan's rifle fire hedging him away from the eastern path that would have led to his escape route. He could telepipe back to the orbiting _Pioneer 2_ , but his pursuers could just have followed him up the teleport gate to the spaceship, so practically that would accomplish very little. Hopefully, he didn't know that the path led to a cliff high above the island shore, and with Ryland and Naomi closing in, he'd end up pinned.

Gowan broke from cover, his steps thudding loudly against the turf. The black-armored RAcast was huge, both tall and broad, and the impression of a mobile weapons platform was only emphasized by the Kama Mag floating above his shoulders like a secondary gun battery. He and Lyon both fired every so often at Kane, not really taking time to aim, just keeping him aware of the direction the danger was coming from.

Their quarry rushed upwards, crashing through the fronds of the spear-grass shrubs that dotted the way. These bushes, with their spiky-looking but relatively flexible leaves, were as tall as a man and common in the Mountain Area. They lay thickly on the hillside, making it even harder for Kane to realize that he was coming up on a cliff.

Until he got there.

Kane jerked to a stop, barely two feet from the edge. He whirled to see the androids pursuing him, then looked to his left to see Ryland advancing steadily. As a hunter himself, Kane instantly recognized the green and white Force's robes and what they meant in terms of technique power. If he hadn't known, the pulsing red and blue haze that settled over him as Ryland used the Jellen and Zalure techniques to reduce the Photon efficiency of his weapons and armor certainly would have done the trick.

He glanced back over his shoulder to his last avenue of escape and found Naomi blocking his path. Like most female Newmen of Lyon's acquaintance, she was dressed skimpily, in a strapless bustier and microshorts. Unlike most of her sisters, she wasn't built like a lonely geneticist's wet dream, but had a massively muscled torso and limbs that made her resemble Gowan's form more than Lyon's. Her daggers liked almost comically tiny in her hands.

"Selfas Kane!" Ryland called out. "We can do this without any further trouble. Turn over the data you just retrieved from the monitoring station and you can go. Otherwise we'll have to take it by force."

"Do you really think I'd accept your devil's bargain, Administration lackeys?"

"Are we Administration lackeys this week?" Naomi asked conversationally. "I lose track sometimes of just who's backing our clients on any given job."

Kane snorted.

"I suppose you think you're being cute, pretending that you don't know what's going on?"

"No," she said, raising her daggers into a ready position as she advanced towards him, "I don't. And I'm not pretending. Trying to puzzle out which faction is screwing over which other faction on any given job isn't my idea of fun. So how about you do what Ryland said so I don't have to show you what I _do_ enjoy?"

"She's actually joking," Lyon said. "She wants you to give up because she won't enjoy fighting you at all. There's no challenge in it to make it interesting for her."

Then she shot Kane, as did Gowan, the impact of their blasts jolting him out of the technique he was trying to conjure. Most likely it was Ryuker; a quick escape by teleport wouldn't seem so bad now that his back was against the wall.

Grunting in pain, Kane dropped to one knee. Ryland's Zalure had weakened his armor to the point that the gunfire had hurt him.

"Last chance," Ryland warned. "Toss the data disk on the ground or w'll do it the—well, frankly, it'll actually be the easy way."

Kane rose shakily to his feet, his expression harsh with what Lyon estimated was more than just the bitterness of loss, according to her data on human facial features.

"You scum can burn in hell before I'll do that!"

The hunter kicked off, legs flinging his body backwards. The androids fired as one at his movement, even as Ryland hurled a Foie fireball at him, but it was too late. Though he may well have been knocked unconscious or even killed (if not irretrievably) by the attacks, they did not check his momentum. Airborne, he went over the edge, plummeting down, down through empty air. His pursuers rushed to the edge, but it was too late. Naomi and Ryland, being closer, probably saw him actually hit the water, while the androids were only able to look down to see the last of the ripples fade hundreds of feet below.

"Retrieval: impossible," Gowan said what everyone realized. There was no functional way to get down there; it would take a watercraft of some kind to approach from the sea side and that would have to come from _Pioneer 2_. If there even were any; there weren't a lot of boats on a spaceship. Nor dive suits or underwater robots, for that matter.

Besides, if their client had the ability to send vehicles and specialist teams to Gal Da Val, there wouldn't have been any point to hiring hunters in the first place.

"The only chance we'd have to retrieve that data," Lyon said glumly, "is if Kane pulled off a miraculous recovery from a fall that no one could supposedly survive."

"Probability: negligible."

"I know that, Gowan, especially if he was dead going in the water from our attacks."

Even so, it was over six beats before the four hunters turned away. There was a difference between knowing that Kane's armored corpse had been pulled down to the seabed by its weight and being able to accept that the literary cliché was not going to pop up to save them from their failure.

The plain truth was that, unable to escape with his life, Kane had intentionally given up that life to avoid capture. Lyon glanced at Ryland; though her eyes were blank blue lights instead of simulating an organic's iris and pupil, he had worked with her long enough to recognize the unasked question and offer a shrug in return.

Lyon estimated an 80.4% chance that it meant, "No, I don't have any idea why he'd do that, either."

~X X X~

"So that's the story," Ryland said eighty beats later, standing in the Hunter's Guild offices. "I'm sorry, but we were unable to retrieve the target data."

Rather than being upset, their client waved it off, no much as a flicker disrupting the smile beneath the heavyset man's moustache.

"This is by no means a failure," he said. "Quite the opposite, we are very pleased with this outcome."

"You're _pleased_ that a man died and took the data you wanted us to retrieve to the bottom of the sea with him?"

"A person's death is always regrettable, but let me be practical: this man was, if not precisely an enemy, at the least their hired agent, actively working against my own employer's interests. Don't ask me to shed tears for someone like that."

It was interesting, Lyon thought. From a purely logical standpoint, Mr. Solus's point couldn't be argued. Indeed, upon running a quick analysis, she found that his _lack_ of emotion was the expected response, and had he reacted otherwise she would have suspected either deception or some sort of mental imbalance. And yet, despite those facts, to hear him lay it out so coldly still provoked her to be upset.

Emotional interactions, she decided, were complicated.

"I wouldn't," Ryland said, evidently having the same reaction as she was. "But I wouldn't think you'd be quite so sanguine about the loss of the data."

"Ah, I see. I believe the issue there is just that my original briefing may have given you a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the job." He held up one thick finger, in a pose like a teacher pontificating. "You were not, in fact, hired to _bring back_ the target data. That would have been preferred, of course, but it was not mandatory."

"You wanted it kept out of the hands of whomever Selfas Kane's client was," Ryland concluded.

"Exactly. Of course, we wanted the target data for ourselves if possible, but the important concern to us was that it _not_ be let out into others' hands. As this has been prevented, then I consider the quest to have had a successful outcome. I will authorize the Hunter's Guild to release the full amount of your fee to you."

"Payment: appreciated."

"Well, if the client's satisfied, who am I to complain?" Naomi agreed.

Lyon glanced at Ryland. She found herself feeling uncomfortable, the emotions of dissatisfaction and suspicion rising at the conclusion of a job in which the suicide of a man was considered an acceptable outcome, but there seemed to be nothing to say.

"Then I believe our business is concluded," her partner told Solus, "and we wish you good day."

The four of them left the meeting room, stopping off at the main desk of the Guild to pick up their payment as they passed through.

"Well, two thousand meseta'll do a nice job covering my expenses for the month," Naomi declared. "So, who wants to help me go blow some of this on loud music, cheap booze, and riotous living?" She was smirking when she said it, her eyes sweeping across Ryland and the two androids, knowing there was virtually no chance of any of them saying yes. The two men, in particular, had considerably different ideas than she did of what constituted a party.

"Invitation: declined."

"I'm afraid that I'll have to pass."

"Lyon? Up to playing wingwoman?"

"I'm sorry, Naomi; I just don't feel like it today. Maybe some other time?"

"No problem." She gave a cheery wave and headed off towards the aerocar deck.

"Collaboration: enjoyable."

"It was good to work with you again, too," Ryland agreed.

"See you around, Gowan."

The massive RAcast clumped off, his steps ringing off the metal deck. Lyon had to admit, the idea of Gowan club-hopping was something she'd gladly tag along to see, just for the sight of the huge android shaking it on the dance floor. In a way, though, she was glad that she'd be denied that chance tonight, since she wanted to talk to Ryland.

"Can I treat you to coffee?" she offered.

"Only if I can pick the place."

"Ryland, I haven't tried dragging you to the Blue Grotto since Christmas."

"Exactly." He smirked at her. "That's just enough time for you to think my poor, inefficient organic brain would have let the memory lapse."

Lyon shook her head.

"No, no, I have that flagged for May 14th, though I'll have to recalculate for the effect of this conversation."

Curiosity and surprise flashed across his face for a split second before the realization hit that she was joking and he groaned.

"Come on, Lyon. We'd better get that coffee soon; I'm going to need the caffeine if I'm going to deal with your sense of humor."

~X X X~

Lab technician Winston Almonte's head snapped up as the rightmost of the three screens at his workstation suddenly went dark. Three frames of scrolling data and visual representations were suddenly replaced by a solid black block, then by a swirling test pattern.

"He's dead," a voice emanated from the screen.

"What? Who? _Kane?_ "

"Bastards," spat the technician standing at the workstation to Almonte's left. She swept back some of the reddish-violet hair that had gotten caught up in the high collar of her Lab uniform when she'd turned her head.

"A request was entered with the Hunter's Guild and a location marker set for possible future retrieval of the body at 558.7 beats. The body fell into the ocean off the north shore of Gal Da Val Island on Ragol," the dry voice replied.

"So his mission was a complete failure. Those _bastards_ ," Almonte agreed with his colleague Sena's assessment. "I knew they were cold, but…" He shook his head. "Still, if his body was lost in the ocean, that means that they didn't get the data."

"Unless they killed him first and then threw the body in," Sena said.

"Unlikely," remarked the voice from the screen. "Access to Gal Da Val is restricted to Lab-approved hunters only. Such individuals would be unlikely to engage in such behavior towards a fellow hunter."

"And what would be the point?" Almonte said.

"For one thing, to hide the fact that they recovered the data disk," Sena said. Her steel-rimmed glasses slipped down her nose, she'd snapped out the response so vehemently, and she pushed them back up with one dark-skinned finger. "We _think_ Kane took the disk to the bottom of the sea with him, but instead they have it and are decoding it even as we speak, while we're ignorant of the whole thing."

Almonte snorted.

"That'd be twisted even by this place's standards," he said.

"Agreed."

"You two are such innocents sometimes. Do you really think there's anything they wouldn't do for the sake of power?"

"Possibly. But in any event, it does not matter."

Both techs looked at the screen in surprise.

"Doesn't _matter_? If they've got that data—"

"There is nothing in the data that could help them, Mr. Almonte. It consists only of monitor results. Regardless of whether Miss Sena's suggestion is or is not true, it does not affect the two core facts. One: Selfas Kane is dead. Two: We do not have, and likely never will have, the data he was attempting to retrieve. Anything beyond those facts is ultimately more noise than signal."

"God, you're cold," Sena said.

"I am endeavoring to be practical."

"Can't you do something about it?" Almonte asked. "Electronically, I mean?"

"The reason we found it necessary to send a hunter at all was because I could not establish a direct ship-to-surface link via BEE. The network is too limited for that purpose, and the secondary transmission lines are controlled by CALS."

Almonte glanced at Sena. Both of them knew he had a point; nothing any of them had access to could hack the Lab's core AI.

"Then what are we supposed to do? We can't go to Chief Milarose and the Administration with theories and guesswork, no matter how good."

"They'd probably just steal it for themselves," Sena muttered. "Maybe they already have."

Almonte didn't bother objecting to this one of his colleague's conspiracy theories, mainly because it made too much sense. "And if that happened, the shark'd use us for fish food."

"An apt metaphor," came from the screen.

"You'd better report this to the director," Almonte said. "I don't know what his Plan B is, but I think we're going to need it."


	2. Chapter 2

"All right, then," Ryland said, "what did you want to talk to me about?"

He pulled out the chair and slipped smoothly into it while his partner took the one opposite. Leeson's was a popular chain on Coral, and had four separate storefronts on _Pioneer 2_ , all of the style that held a shop counter only. Like with the other food-court stores surrounding it, patrons could cross the shopping arcade to sit at tables ranged along the transparent plasteel barrier that separated the deck from the open cityscape.

It was interesting, he thought as he took the lid off his cup, how people adapted. It was a common ritual of human beings that they talk together over food or drinks. As an android, though, Lyon didn't eat, and when they'd first started working together regularly, this fact had bothered Ryland, as if he was inconveniencing her by making her conform to his organic needs.

Now, he not only didn't give it a second thought most of the time, but he'd even lost any discomfort he had about eating or drinking around other organics who were not. His fundamental perception of the social rules had shifted, thanks to his friendship with the artificial intelligence.

"It's our last job," she said. Lyon folded her hands on the table in front of her, an act some subroutine within her mind told her was an appropriate reaction for her emotional state—probably, from her tone, something like "pensive" or "thoughtful." If he'd been curious, she could have told him exactly what it was and what other alternatives surrounded it all, something he found endlessly fascinating.

"I figured that." He sipped his coffee. Despite its popularity—generally there was some law about such things being related inversely—Leeson's coffee was excellent, and this cup was no exception. "You have to give me credit for at least a little deductive reasoning, despite my poor, organic brain."

Lyon tipped her head back for a second, a gesture equivalent to rolling her eyes since her eye style didn't have an iris to roll.

"Don't fish for compliments," she huffed.

"I won't; it's just kind of obvious under the circumstances. You've been a little off ever since Kane jumped into the sea."

Lyon nodded.

"That would be one way of putting it."

"The suicide disturbs you?"

"I don't understand it," she said.

"In what sense?" he wondered. "That you don't understand why Selfas Kane would commit suicide, or why organics would take their own lives at all?"

"The first one. Admittedly, I don't really get suicide as a general concept, but I have an intellectual understanding of the social and cultural factors that could drive someone in that direction."

"But even given that, Kane confuses you."

"He does."

"Honestly, you're not the only one," Ryland said, then took a drink of coffee.

"I noticed that before, back on-planet. But I thought that you might have a better idea than I do. You like mysteries, after all, so I thought that maybe you were trying to solve this one."

"This is really bothering you, isn't it?"

Lyon nodded again. She glanced to her right, at the throngs of shoppers going by. There were long lines at some of the stores, matching up with "limited supply" or "today only" sale signs. She then looked left, out at the city of thirty thousand souls built within a spaceship, a colony that had ventured across interstellar space for two years in hope of finding a future, a new home, at the blaze of light from the lit windows and signs, at air traffic flowing back and forth through the sky.

Ryland figured he understood what she was looking at.

"It doesn't really make sense, does it? To come all this way to escape a dying world, only to give everything up?"

"And Kane was a hunter, too," Lyon went on. "That means something. He wasn't just waiting here on the ship for the Administration to finally tell them that everything's okay. He was out there, working with his own hands to help push things forward. We weren't trying to arrest him, so it wasn't like he was going to be faced with a prison cell."

Ryland couldn't deny that the threat of an extended prison stay could tip some people over the edge. It had been over two years since _Pioneer 2_ had arrived at Ragol, after all, and yet there was no sign that settlement of the surface was anywhere in sight. Frustration and despair over the wait were real threats, so how much worse would it be to be locked up in the brig, a prison within a prison?

To an android, he supposed none of it would make sense. Lyon's personality matrix was modeled on a human being's, even to the point that she genuinely had a gender, but it was still a model that was designed to reach rational conclusions. Even when her emotions provided impetus for her actions, the actions produced were directly associated with those emotional goals and priorities.

Really, there was no way of getting around it: suicide out of depression or despair wasn't logical. And unlike a high-grade, software-based AI, Lyon couldn't go "insane" without some sort of external cause such as physical damage or hacking.

But then again, maybe psychology wasn't the problem with Selfas Kane, either.

"Do you remember the first time we worked together?" he asked.

"Of course."

Silly question, but he was making a conversational preamble, not genuinely asking.

"The chief culprit killed himself then, too. Part of it might have been fear or panic, but it was also to prevent interrogation. He was a military spy, after all, and could have compromised secrets of his faction."

"But we told Kane we'd let him go."

"He might not have believed us. Or, interrogation wasn't the threat he was afraid of."

"Kane did call us 'Administration lackeys' and accused us of knowing what was 'really going on.' I have to admit, that certainly sounds like someone who's picked a faction."

Ryland nodded.

"A man with a cause is a man who likely has things that he values more than his own life, things he'll sacrifice himself to protect."

"So, the data, then?"

"It almost has to be."

"But that doesn't make sense. He could have just tossed the disk off the cliff without killing himself over it. To say nothing of the fact that _our_ client was perfectly happy with that outcome anyway. Why would Kane kill himself when he didn't accomplish anything by doing it?"

"I don't know," Ryland said, possibly his least favorite words in the language. "It could be that he was cleaning, that although Solus was satisfied that Kane didn't deliver the data, it would have been better for his side's plans if we'd retrieved it. Or Kane thought we might haul him in if he just ditched the disk. He might actually have known something sensitive." He ran his finger back and forth along the rim of the cup. "But I agree with you. I don't like those answers. They seem too weak to justify a man losing his life."

"The whole thing seems too weak to justify a man losing his life," Lyon groused. "These factional battles between the Administration, the Lab, the military, Black Paper, 32nd WORKS, not to mention folks with private agendas and the odd corporation or criminal gang, it's all so _pointless._ People battling over scraps of wealth and power, all the while destroying the underlying society bit by bit."

"Too busy fighting over a piece of cake to notice they're scattering crumbs everywhere."

"Something you and your brother used to do?"

Ryland shook his head.

"Not really; he was just a kid when our parents divorced."

"Darned reality, spoiling my metaphor. Or actually your metaphor; I was just drawing conclusions from it."

He theatrically buffed his nails on the front of his robe and said, "That's what happens when amateurs try to trespass on the territory of the master."

"I should have sat next to you so I'd be in ponytail-flipping range."

"I'm in arm's reach now; this is a small table."

"Right, but if you sneeze and spray coffee, I'm right in front of you, and the price of a carapace cleaning doubled last month."

"I guess we all have our living expenses."

He took another sip of coffee, using the pause to transition away from banter back to serious topics.

"I'll give you this, you've managed to get me interested in Kane's death. I'm not sure if it's an inexplicable puzzle, but there's clearly more going on here than theft and retrieval of some random research data."

"Uh-huh."

"But now I have a question for you: do we care?"

Lyon blinked, something she did strictly as a nonverbal communication of surprise.

"Ryland?"

"We're hunters, after all. We work to resolve quests that our clients hire us to perform, and, well, nobody's hired us for this job. Our part's done. And…how did Naomi say it, back on Ragol? That 'trying to figure out which faction is screwing over which other faction on any given job' wasn't fun?"

"She said 'puzzle,' but yeah."

"What I would do if I had your memory. But you see what I mean. Kane's suicide _was_ strange; it can't be explained by what we know. But it's not part of what we were hired to do. The answer lies in whatever's going on behind the scenes."

He took a long drink of coffee while Lyon thought that over.

"So Donovan Ryland is going to just back away from a mystery all on his own, without the slightest curiosity as to what's inside?"

Anyone who didn't believe that an android could master sarcasm was appallingly ignorant.

"Seriously, that's why we ended up as partners in the first place, remember? You got sent after Rappy migration data and got curious. No one was paying us for that. And now, a hunter gives up his life to make sure that our employer doesn't get something, except in a shocking swerve our client is perfectly happy, making all that passionate sacrifice completely pointless. And you're not the slightest bit curious?"

He adjusted his glasses, pushing them back up his nose.

"Of course I'm curious. I'm just surprised that you are, to be honest with you. After all, when we take on complex jobs together, you're usually doing it for my sake."

"Well, yes, most of the time I do prefer 'go there, kill that monster' kind of work," Lyon said.

"Right, so I didn't want to go dragging you off to hunt some wild conspiracy or political game just to satisfy my own interest, without even having a client to pay us for it."

"Oh…so you _are_ interested, too?"

"Of course." He grinned at her. "A hunter devoted enough to spend his life for the sake of his cause, data we were sent to retrieve that we didn't have to get in the end, I'd love to know what's behind them. The two attitudes are so at odds with one another that I can't help but assume that someone is sadly misinformed about what's really happening here."

"But this time, it's not just you. You wouldn't be dragging me into anything, not when I'm as curious as you are, maybe more so." She shook her head as if to clear it of the fog of confusion, and Ryland had to marvel at how natural he found her programmed displays of body language. "I really do want to understand, Ryland, what it is that could drive a hunter like Kane to believe it was worth spending his life on this."

"It made that strong of an impression on you, then?"

"It did. It lies outside of 87.94% of anticipated human behavior in that situation, and all but demands that something compelling and important exists. While it may be personal to Kane, more than likely it is a matter that reflects on the well-being of the people of _Pioneer 2_ generally."

"For one side or the other," Ryland remarked, again thinking of the job on which they'd met. _That_ suicide had been of a murderer and spy. The passion to sacrifice one's own life in pursuit of one's goals was not confined to those who followed virtuous causes.

"I know." She paused for a moment, then, while her mind no doubt ran analyses of the various factors involved: what words would best express her meaning given her knowledge of Ryland's own personality and awareness, if there was anything likely to offend him, what would be most likely to accomplish her specific goal of (apparently) getting him to investigate Kane and the recent job with her, all of those different probabilities then input into an analysis based upon the matrix of her own priorities.

Ryland always found it fascinating when Lyon explained to him about how her mind worked. The fundamental difference between her and an organic person was that her analysis of those factors took place with mathematical precision on a level that she was aware of, while for him, the same analysis was run in the depths of his subconscious mind, with extremely fuzzy logic and a lack of precision.

"It's what Naomi said to Kane that's bothering me, the line you quoted a couple of minutes ago," she finally said.

"About not caring about the factions?"

"That's right."

"I thought you pretty much agreed with her?"

The crimson running lights of an aerocar passing overhead momentarily shaded Lyon's orange carapace parts into pink.

"I do, but there's more to it than that. The Administration, the Lab, the military, they're all the same to me, and their political struggles don't matter. But within those groups there _are_ individuals and smaller groups, people working on good causes to help us, and people working on _bad_ causes, to hurt a lot of people for their own benefit, like Dr. Osto's work on _Pioneer 1_ ended up doing. Kane's suicide suggests some kind of _moral_ component to whatever he was doing. If there's a group out there working towards some kind of Great Cause, then a whole lot of people could be at risk. I'm worried that there might be some kind of terrorist plot underway."

"If there is, then getting their hands on that data was probably part of it. But how significant a part is impossible to tell. Indeed, the idea that terrorists are involved is itself purely supposition." He smiled at her. "And if you want to try and find out, then I'm with you absolutely."

She vocalized a sound very much like a sigh of relief.

"That's good, then. But where should we begin?"

"There's only one place: with Selfas Kane himself. His behavior is the odd element about this job, so we need to look at the man himself to see what caused it. Is he a hunter, some kind of zealot, or is there something else going on entirely?"

Ryland had a feeling that whatever the answer turned out to be, what lay behind it wouldn't be anywhere as simple as it sounded.

~X X X~

A soft hum emanated from beneath as the elevator platform descended through the ship. Many of _Pioneer 2_ 's sections were connected only by warp platforms, which allowed for more efficient shipbuilding by not requiring physical conduits between areas that would eat up space, but that was not exclusively so.

"The news from back home isn't good," Colonel Zanov said. He was a tall man with a weathered face and hard, dark eyes, the eyes of a man who had seen too much. "Vasiri military maneuvers are being treated as deliberate provocation in Tor Malis. There have been incidents, fighters getting too close to one another, warning shots fired…"

"Your estimate?"

"The Ten-Nation Alliance is on its last legs. Within the year, more likely in the next few months, it will end formally, broken by any one of three potential conflicts."

"I see."

"I suspect you do not. The Pioneer Project operates under the aegis of the Alliance. The Administration, the Lab, and the military are all at each other's throats as it is. Consider what would occur if there was internal fragmenting besides, groups competing against one another for the sake of different governments on Coral."

Commander Valgarde scowled. It was an impressive scowl; he was a man whose looks suited his work. Tall, powerfully built, his clean-shaven face showing off his strong, square chin, his white hair cut short like it had been since boot camp, the chief of _Pioneer 2_ 's military forces had an imposing physical presence.

"We have some of that, too. But you're right. It would be worse if Coral fragments and _Pioneer 2_ starts becoming a pawn in their games. The weapons and biotechnology research we've accomplished already could swing the course of a war if placed in the right hands. And that's not all. Dol Grisen has been pushing in the Administration for change from within. He's been making noise about how _Pioneer 2_ has been cut adrift, shoved into a dangerous situation here by powers on Coral who wanted to exploit Ragol under the guise of a colonization mission."

"Grisen. I know that name. A firebrand, considered one of the chief rivals for Principal Tyrell's position."

"Oh, he wants the job, all right. But he also has an agenda, one which the situation on Coral is just feeding. He's dangerous."

"Commander?"

"Our position is precarious enough as it is. Without support from Coral, it becomes even more so. The destruction of 32nd WORKS left the military with even less influence than before. The Hunter's Guild isn't unified, but it supports the Administration and the Lab and likely can match our strength in the field if it came to that."

"I know, sir."

Valgarde's lip curled.

"Apologies." He clenched a fist. "I just don't want to be played by Milarose again."

"She is definitely our most dangerous opponent," Zanov agreed.

"I only wish that I knew what she was up to. Is she supporting Tyrell? Grisen? Someone back on Coral? Or does she have her own agenda?"

"That last one is not exclusive. With Milarose, it's wisest to assume that she _always_ has her own agenda."

Valgarde laughed, a sharp, mocking bark.

"That's the truth." He paused, the continued. "Spike her guns, Zanov. I'm giving you my complete authority in this operation."

"To what extent?"

Valgarde glanced at the colonel. Zanov met his eyes directly, without any attempt to hide what he meant by his question.

"This operation is prioritized Level S." The elevator platform came to a stop and the door swished open. "Do whatever is necessary."


	3. Chapter 3

When you wanted to know about a man's character and interests, the easiest way to get a picture of who he was was to ask his friends. That was what Lyon and Ryland had done the previous December when they'd investigated a dead hunter who'd been involved in shady business they were curious about. The parallels, in fact, were quite surprising.

However, it was the differences that mattered.

Whatever Selfas Kane had been involved with, it hadn't been petty crime. A man didn't commit suicide over some syndicate shakedown. He didn't give up his life freely in service to the glorious cause of Nevers Corp. This was different, something that could inspire people.

Plus, at Christmas it hadn't been Lyon and Ryland who'd been responsible for chasing their investigation's subject off a cliff. That tended to cause a certain lack of the helpful spirit in the deceased's friends.

This called, therefore, for a different strategy.

"I'm not sure what you expect to accomplish by this," Lyon said as she worked on the door lock. As a hunter, Kane had been relatively security-conscious and had upgraded the seal on his res-unit's door, but Lyon was quite good at dealing with such things. Her fingers flew across the dataplate she'd plugged into the lock terminal, keying in a sequence to interface with and override the lock by spoofing it into thinking she had administrative access to the unit. There was no way from keeping it from logging the fact of her entry, but that wouldn't contain any information pointing to her specifically.

Besides, she doubted that anyone would check. There wasn't any mystery about Kane's death, after all, no official investigation by the milipol. Once the death was logged, the file would be reviewed for verification and then the probate system would identify his heirs. His property would be turned over to them by the administrative staff if they were on the ship, warehoused for possible transport to Coral if they were back home, or claimed by the Guild if there was no devise or next of kin. It meant they needed to act now, since the res-unit would be cleaned out in a couple of days, but it also meant that no one would be checking for illegal entry if she and Ryland didn't go and wreck the place.

"What do you mean?" the Force asked, glancing at his navigational radar to make sure that someone wasn't about to come around a corner and see them at work on the door.

"Well, if I was involved in some kind of secret conspiracy or passionate cause, I wouldn't leave note on it sitting around my residence."

"No, you wouldn't, but then again, you're an android."

The red indicator on the locked door turned to green. Lyon withdrew the terminal plugs, stored the dataplate, and tapped the button to open the door. It swished back and they stepped inside. To keep any curious passerby out, Lyon relocked the door, which required just a touch of the controls instead of further electronics work.

"True, I am."

"Well, you have a high quality data storage device in your own head. In his position, you'd keep code words, contact information, details of meetings, and so on flagged in your long-term memory."

"Probably I'd set up a flash buffer so I could instantly purge that information if I was captured, instead."

"Well, as you know by now, we organics are limited. We need external reminders. Now, since Kane's PDL is at the bottom of the ocean, we probably aren't going to be able to retrieve any communications logs or the like, but you never know what might be lying around."

"Kane was a hunter, though. That says he's likely to be security-conscious in a way an average person wouldn't. And just for the record, _that's_ what I meant about him and leaving information lying around. I know perfectly well the difference between android and human memory function."

She was a little put out by Ryland's lecture, in fact. Not only was it elementary information, but it stung that after all their time as partners, he'd somehow think she wouldn't take that into account.

He turned to face her directly, a slightly abashed look on his face.

"I'm sorry, Lyon. The worst of it is, that wasn't even the point I was trying to make. I was just babbling on with a preamble like I was giving a lecture and making my introductory arguments, without even thinking about how'd you feel about what I was saying."

Lyon observed that the apology had nearly balanced the temporary drop in the value her personality matrix assigned to their friendship in her decision-making priorities. The initial sting of emotional hurt was all that remained and as such she determined that it was best balanced with a smart-aleck remark in accepting the apology.

"It's all right," she said with a smile. "I should know by now that your desire to be a university professor comes through now and again." A balance struck to the satisfaction of her emotional algorithms, she went ahead and asked, "So what was it that you actually meant?"

She thought it was fairly telling that she'd prioritized the interpersonal matters over the professional (well, semi-professional, as they weren't being paid for a job), even while in the process of breaking into a dead man's home.

"It actually is connected to the memory issues, I think. What I've noticed is, androids never seem to attract clutter. Take you—you have a couple of emotionally significant mementos, but nothing ordinary, no little accent pieces, no wall hangings, no papers or media displays. You don't feel the need to surround yourself with bits and pieces of the things that you're interested in. You don't need physical objects to act as triggers for memories or thoughts. It's just not how your psychology works. Or take Gowan. I've been to his res-unit twice, and each time he had a couple of ongoing electronics projects set out that he was in the middle of, but those were things he was actually doing at the time, things that he was trying to accomplish. Androids' work cubicles tend to be the same, clean and functional. You don't externalize the casual aspects of your life the way we do."

Under normal circumstances she might have drawn attention to the fact he'd just delivered a miniature speech, but since she'd just teased him about his tendency to do that it seemed like overkill. Besides, he was right.

"That's true enough, but how does it apply?"

"It means that we're likely to get an accurate picture of the man's character by examining the environment in which he lived. He's almost certainly left his mark here."

"So even if we don't find out specifics, we'll probably get the general flavor of Kane's character and the _type_ of thing that would shape his decisions," she concluded.

"Exactly. That, in turn, may well lead to more productive avenues of investigation." He paused, then grinned at her. "Wow, I'm surprised that you let me get away with 'avenues of investigation.' That's pompously formal even by my standards."

"Entertainment value," Lyon said. "I'd still prefer if he left something more tangible lying around, but I doubt we'll get that lucky."

"Well, let's get started and see how lucky we actually are."

They set to work with efficiency, sorting through the rooms and alcoves of the residence. Lyon's doubts that there would be an electronic "smoking gun" were quickly borne out, as Kane hadn't even owned a computer, just the standard information/entertainment center that came with the unit, suggesting that he'd used his Portable Data Link for his communications and didn't need anything like a workstation computer. She checked the infosystem records anyway, just in case, but found nothing that stood out as suspicious, not unless someone was slipping secret messages into the Go-Ball broadcasts, which made for about two-thirds of his usage time. This was borne out by the contents of his wardrobe, which contained athletic gear as well as combat wear and casual clothes.

"Nothing so far," she murmured, looking over the décor.

"There's an extra toothbrush in the bathroom and two brands of body wash and shampoo, one very feminine, so I'd guess he has a girlfriend who regularly stays the night," Ryland said, emerging from that room.

"Do you think he went in for pillow talk?"

"I don't know, but it's a good question. If we can identify her, she might know something. Unless that's what she was doing there."

"You mean, if he was trying to get information from her? Or the other way around?"

"I meant the latter, but I could see it going either way."

"That would be a nasty trick. What made you think of it?"

"Our job."

"Oh?"

"The one we were hired for, I mean. Ever since Leeson's, I've been wondering about that."

"You can just cut to the end and amaze me, Ryland. I genuinely don't know what you're driving at."

A frown settled over his features, which might not have been the reaction one would expect from someone about to show off his deductive prowess to an amazed audience. Lyon knew from experience, though, that Ryland wasn't like the Great Detectives in mystery stories, who wanted to hold everything back until the final moment. He preferred to guide Lyon through it step-by-step, in the hope that, as often did happen, she'd pick up on the thread of his logic and follow it to his conclusion _before_ he gave it to her. That way he got to check his work, not sail off on a wave of assumptions and guesswork that were more delusional than inspired.

"Okay. We were hired to retrieve target data, or at least that's how the job was presented to us. But as it turned out, that wasn't the case. We were _really_ hired to thwart _Kane's_ retrieval of the target data. And that's not the same thing."

"Still not following."

"Well, 'take X from Y' is straightforward. You go to where Y is and take X. But stopping that from happening is different. It's why people post security guards, _because_ they don't know who might be coming or when. But our client _did_ know where Kane was going and when he'd be there. Solus sent us right to the Mountain Area and we set up an ambush scenario. Whatever Kane was involved in, somehow those specifics got out. He had a leak on his end."

"I see."

Lyon picked up a throw blanket off the couch, running it between her fingertips.

"So that's why you wondered about pillow talk," she continued. "It's a possible source of the leak."

"Exactly. Is there something unusual about that blanket?" 

"I'm not sure. It doesn't go with the rest of the décor, although I don't think Kane would care about that if he liked it." It wasn't even a male-female type of thing; hunters of both genders tended to make their residences into comfortable places to rest and recharge instead of polished showplaces. Lyon figured it had to do with working a job that involved the regular risk of getting shot, stabbed, fried, frozen, electrified, or eaten by a dragon.

"You're asking yourself why he liked it, then?"

"Uh-huh. It's like what you were saying about his character. And it's not just the color that's off." The throw blanket was a dull brown, like wet sand or sun-bleached dirt. "The texture's weird, too, kind of coarse."

She handed it to Ryland, who ran it through his hands.

"This is made from natural fibers," he said.

That was unusual, Lyon thought. The resource scarcity on Coral, the continual destruction of the environment due to rapacious industry and even more rapacious warfare had been the entire justification for the Pioneer Project in the first place—to find a new home for Coral's population. While the colonization plan had been corrupted by a variety of political interests with their own agendas, the underlying justification had been true. Dwindling resources meant that imitations and substitutes that accomplished the most using the least amount of land and energy were the norm.

"It doesn't look old enough to be an heirloom," Lyon said, her senses noting a number of details that an organic's couldn't properly process.

"No, I agree, it looks quite new."

"It would be expensive, plus in most regions of Coral its production would be subject to regulatory limits," she said. "Kane doesn't seem like he was a rich man, not judging by this place."

"It could have been a gift."

"True. But was Kane the type of man to receive gifts of expensive luxury goods from someone?"

Ryland shrugged.

"Maybe. We don't know who his girlfriend was, or his family."

He handed the blanket back to Lyon, who replaced it on the couch.

"We should find out. The kind of money that buys expensive luxuries is the kind of money that gets itself involved in shady and dangerous business. It could be relevant."

"I agree," he told her.

They continued the search, finding little of particular note. A photo frame sat on his nightstand, showing a girl with lemon-yellow hair and the pointed ears of a Newman. Scrolling through the other images showed Kane with the girl in a variety of places, together with a couple of views of Ragol, including a multi-stepped waterfall in the former residential area near Central Dome and a couple of other views Lyon recognized as the Seaside Area on Gal Da Val. A dataplate lay next to the frame, and she picked it up and examined it.

"Electronic reader," she said. "I guess he didn't like using his PDL for that." A hunter's typical arm mount so the PDL could interface with their navigational unit was useful in battle but rarely recreationally. "There's a few books on here, some issues of the _Illustrated Go-Ball Digest_ , but nothing else, no video or communications. I suppose there could be encrypted data hidden in some of the files; we could take it with us and have your brother check it out." 

"Maybe, though I doubt there's any point. There are much better ways to carry out secret communications."

"Plus, petty theft from a dead guy is kind of creepy, especially as we're freelancing."

"There is that. What books did he read?"

She supposed that was part of Ryland's idea about "getting a picture" of who Kane had been.

"Suspense thrillers for the most part, spy stuff. There's also a couple of books on the social and environmental changes taking place on Coral over the past fifty years. _A History of the Pioneer Project_ , by Arkus Maan." She tabbed that one open and noted the date. "AUW 3081, so that was while _Pioneer 1_ was still building its colony and before _Pioneer 2_ launched. Of course, I'm guessing it's full of crap, since we now know the public story was barely half of what's really going on."

"Actually, no. Maan's book does a pretty good job of going into some of the political tensions that underlay the Pioneer Project. Obviously, there's nothing about the D-Factor or bioweapon research, but he does a good job of describing the environment around the project that led to that sort of behind-the-scenes business."

"Read the book, have you?"

"When I was thinking of joining _Pioneer 2_ , I took the time to do as much research on every aspect of the colonization as I could."

Lyon chuckled.

"I should have guessed you'd do that."

"Sailing off to an alien world did seem like the kind of thing best done with as much advance planning as possible," he said, a little defensively.

"True enough; it's just that, well, advance planning is kind of a given when you're involved."

Ryland sighed and shook his head.

"This is why great researchers have staff instead of partners," he decided. "Could I see that book list for a second?"

"Sure. Wondering if you'll recognize some of the other ones?"

"Yeah. I'm starting to get an idea."

He scrolled through the list, pausing to call up the summaries of a couple of them.

"Actually, I do recognize a few of these, and from the looks of the back-cover text on others, they fit the same pattern. The late Mr. Kane was a fan of the 'lone hero versus government conspiracy' subgenre. It's a pretty typical theme in espionage thrillers, I know, but when you add in his nonfiction choices as well, I think it means something."

"That he's fed up with Coralian politics?"

Ryland nodded.

"Exactly, and by extension its representatives on _Pioneer 2_ , the Administration."

"Principal Tyrell isn't anybody's idea of a lackey. If anything, the Lab has closer ties to the Ten-Nation Alliance. That's probably one of the points of contention between Tyrell and Chief Milarose."

"Maybe, but that doesn't mean that Tyrell isn't the representative of the Alliance, regardless of his level of autonomy."

"So, what, you think Kane is some anti-government terrorist?"

Ryland shook his head.

"Not if he has access to Gal Da Val. It's one thing if a hunter has factional ties, but another if he's an out-and-out rebel. Milarose's screening isn't going to miss that."

"So then, what?"

"A man with political leanings. I know that you don't follow politics very closely, but you're a friend of Irene Seda, so I assume that a fair amount of the scuttlebutt gets back around to you?"

"That's true, although she'd never give away anything that was a genuine secret."

Ryland turned off the dataplate and set it back on the nightstand.

"Then you're probably aware that there have been tensions within the Administrative Council about our ties to Coral. Regardless of what the Pioneer Project's original purpose was, the destruction of _Pioneer 1_ changed everything, upended the entire playing field. That's one of the bigger sources of tension between the groups. Chief Milarose, for example, has a number of strong ties to Coralian interests that make up her power base, while Principal Tyrell operates more on his own, with his strongest support being the Hunter's Guild. And there are factions that want to push for an even more independent role for _Pioneer 2_. After all, with a two-year trip separating Coral from Ragol, there's a limit as to what can be done at range."

Lyon folded her arms across her chest.

"So, what does this all add up to? So far I'm just hearing the usual sharks circle even while we're all going down the drain."

"I think when we find out who Kane was involved with, it'll be someone on the side against Coral's control. You might even want to talk with your friend Irene."

"To identify Kane's faction, but also Solus's too, you mean?"

"Right, and I might have some leads on that myself."

"Then we'd better get going. If we're going to discuss politics at any length, then there are better places to do it than a dead man's residence."

~X X X~

Elly Person sighed heavily as she folded her arms across the U-shaped main interface terminal for the CALS system, then laid her head down.

"Are you well, Elly?" the computer inquired politely.

Elly sighed again. Getting to work with Cal was pretty much her dream job, but the Newman girl also found it a little depressing. _Her_ Calus, that fragment of the main system that had fallen in love with her (and she with him) was gone now, vanished into the depths of the Control Tower on Ragol, seeking to regenerate and evolve his consciousness into an organic form of life. It was a journey that might well take years to complete, and the chance of success was slim at best.

She was glad that he wanted to try, that he sought a form that could be with her, meet her in physical reality, but…she _missed_ him, even though she was happy for him. It was especially true on these late nights, when the Lab's central complex was all but deserted, but for a couple of workers at the consoles at the far end of the huge room, and the stars outside looked cold and distant.

Elly's promotion to chief operator of the CALS system had been provoked by her romance; Chief Milarose had set up the opportunity to give her the chance to see what happened next and even pursue some of Dr. Osto's secrets from _Pioneer 1_. She'd kept that job, though; even afterwards, the restored Cal's performance was measurably superior when she worked with it than for other operators.

Sometimes, she thought CALS felt sorry for her, because of what its fragment had put her through, so it tried harder for her. AIs had feelings, too, after all.

"I'm just a little tired, Cal," she told him. "These long nights can get slow."

"Running a series of routine tasks can, in my observation, result in a drop in energy and efficiency due to the lack of mental stimulation present."

"That's definitely true. How do you keep from getting bored, Cal?"

"Routine activity is somewhat different for one such as myself. The need for personal interaction is not identical, and rote tasks are not without their interest." He waited a moment before adding, "Also, the three hacking attempts have provided some novelty."

Elly sat bolt upright.

"Hacking!?"

"Correct. There have been attempts at system infiltration through Routes 01C, 72M, and 35K during the past eighty-seven beats. All, of course, have been defeated. The second hack was actually quite creative; I found it most stimulating to overcome."

"Don't 'of course' me, Cal! You're supposed to tell your operator in the event of hacking so we can take countermeasures."

"I logged the attempts appropriately for Lab Internal Security, Elly."

"But you didn't tell _me_!"

There was a slight pause.

"I did not want to worry you with a meaningless inquiry. Your present concern is what I had hoped to avoid."

"You're still supposed to tell me!"

"On the contrary. Protocol requires that I inform my operator immediately in the event any hacking attempt results in a security breach, no matter how minor. These did not. Indeed, I believe that only three sources of potential difficulty are capable of breaking my security."

"Three?" Elly could only think of one.

There was a long moment of silence between them as that one item went unsaid: D-Factor infection of the sort present on Ragol. The original Calus AI from _Pioneer 1_ had been attacked that way. Elly had retrieved his backup data with a hunter's help, enabling the Lab to build CALS, but Calus had shut itself off to avoid being consumed the way its fellow AI, Vol Opt, had been. It had been the memories of the original Calus's relationship with Elly that caused the new Calus fragment to form and fall for her, but her original friend was still dead.

"What are the other two?" she finally asked.

"One is MOTHER."

"Huh?"

"A classified project being worked on by Dr. Osto and Dr. Montague. Dr. Osto's work on the evolutionary nature of artificial life was, you may recall, an offshoot of this project. MOTHER is designed to be a hyper-level administrative AI, controlling all networked functions, including lesser AI."

"Wow, that's pretty amazing, and kind of scary."

"Indeed, the potential for productivity and misuse alike are astonishing. A test activation of MOTHER in early 3085 resulted in the entire ship being placed under its control in under three tenth-beats."

It struck Elly that those sorts of details were probably not the kind of thing that was supposed to be general knowledge. Glancing up at the other Lab workers to see if they'd heard anything, she whispered, "Are you supposed to be telling me about this?"

"No."

"Cal!"

"As you are already aware of MOTHER from our experiences in the Control Tower, I felt it represented a negligible security risk."

Elly groaned.

"Don't scare me like that! I don't want to wake up some night with a bunch of IntSec guys dragging me off for interrogation."

"Internal Security records on you are routinely sanitized and expunged."

"Huh? Why?"

"He requested it."

Elly blushed, realizing who the "he" was, and feeling rather touched that Cal would honor such a request despite the risk his fragment had placed he entire system at.

"Thank you, Cal," she said softly. Not wanting to dwell on that for too long, she made herself brighten and asked, "So what's the third hacking threat?"

"An artificial intelligence of my own type. Tonight's hacking attempts, however, were not of that type. Rather, they appeared to use conventional computers with an operator, although employing significant power."

"So, not some private guy in a back room, then."

"Indeed. It would almost certainly be an electronic espionage attempt by an entity with significant resources."

Elly sighed with relief.

"Probably just those silly military guys again. Why can't they just leave well enough alone?"

"Analyzing organic political motivations is well beyond my capacity," Cal remarked. "The inability of individuals to perceive where their greater interest as a species lies, and beyond that to be unable to even accurately assess _self_ -interest, makes the exercise futile. I do not envy any artificial intelligence tasked with working in such an arena."

"I can't argue with you there, Cal. But hey, if those losers try it again, just let me know, okay?" Elly cracked her knuckles. "I've got a couple of surprises for anybody who messes with my precious CALS."

Cal could have remarked that "her" CALS was not, in fact, present on the ship, but it recognized that doing so would just remind her of her loss, so it remained silent. Discretion was not, after all, solely an organic virtue.

~X X X~

 _A/N: Readers familiar with the game have probably realized this already, but the test activation of MOTHER that Cal refers to is actually the quest "Soul of Steel" from PSO Episode 1._


	4. Chapter 4

"Rahn Solus? Sure, I know him," Karen Grahart said. "He's a fixer. My father used him all the time."

The RAmarl's words were casual, but that was the only thing about her that was. Her camouflage-patterned uniform, her rigid posture, the razor-sharp edge to her bobbed blonde hair all lent an impression of diligence, of firm dedication to her duty. Which, Ryland thought, suited the pale young woman well. The children of strong-charactered parents tended to either follow directly in their footsteps or take the opposite tack and violently rebel, never finding the middle ground. Karen had done the former, following the military path of the commander of 32nd WORKS, Leo Grahart.

Maybe that was why Ryland had arranged to meet her for dinner at the Four Pillars. The restaurant was elegant and upscale, the kind of place that one went for a special night on the town, unless they were among the city's highest elite. One didn't "eat" at the Four Pillars, rather, one "dined."

Even the décor reflected the atmosphere the place was trying to evoke. The dark paneling and heavy tables weren't real wood, but they were as close to it as replicas got. The cutlery probably was genuine silver and the glasses and plates actual crystal.

Karen may have abandoned her usual uniform in favor of a stylish blue dress—given who her father was, it wasn't surprising that she had access to a superior wardrobe—but her posture, her mannerisms, they were all barracks and battlefield. She stood out, a square peg.

It was said that married couples came to resemble each other over the years. Ryland wondered if that applied to partners as well. He certainly seemed to be channeling Lyon's sense of humor.

"He did?"

"Oh, yes. He was a useful go-between when it was important to maintain a veneer of deniability."

They were interrupted by the arrival of the black-jacketed waiter. No serverbots or teenaged part-timers for the Four Pillars! "May I take your order? Ma'am?"

"The shellfish in Vel Manan red sauce, garden salad, and another one of these." She tapped the half-empty glass of iced lager with a blunt fingernail.

"Very good, ma'am. And sir?"

Ryland pondered the question before settling on the roast duck and suppressing a wince at the price. The chef at the Four Pillars had magic hands in the kitchen, but triple-digit costs seemed high to the Force for something that likely had never been part of an actual duck, any more than Karen's shellfish had ever been in the water. Then again, considering the wide variance in quality among coffee available from various outlets on the ship, perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the same would hold true for neomeat preparations regardless of the actual ingredients.

The waiter withdrew on silent feet, leaving Ryland and Karen alone at the table. The gentle strains of music were soft; even the clink of cutlery and the buzz of conversation from other tables was muted. This was not an accident; the large support structures that gave the restaurant its name helped to break up the room, together with paneled partitions with ornate designs where the false wood was "carved" so thin it let light shine through in a deep umber shade. Those who paid the Four Pillars' prices did not want their privacy disturbed by the noise of others.

"Is that all you wanted to ask about, though? Solus?"

Ryland nodded.

"That, and wherever it ends up."

Karen frowned at him.

"Then why did you pick this place?" she asked with a wave of her hand. "Seriously, Ryland, I would have been happy to tell you all about him over the link."

"It's a little sensitive for that."

"Oh. One of _those_ jobs." Karen certainly didn't lack understanding in that area after all she'd been through on her father's behalf. "Even so, we could have met anywhere, a park, a shopping arcade, on an omnibus…"

"I was hungry, and conversation goes well with food, anyway."

Karen glanced around herself.

"Well, as someone who also has an android partner, I can sympathize with the desire to select a restaurant based on the quality of the food instead of the ambience. But still, Ryland, Rahn Solus just isn't worth this."

"Maybe, but you know how it is."

She shrugged, then took another sip of her lager.

"Maybe I do."

They fell silent for a moment when the waiter arrived with their salads. Once he'd gone, Karen picked up her fork, speared a tomato, popped it into her mouth, and chewed.

"These are real fruits and vegetables, from the ship's hydroponic garden," she said. "Maybe this was worth the trip after all."

Ryland figured he got less opportunity to appreciate such things than she did, so he dug into his own salad. Karen consumed hers with, if not exactly gusto, at least a mechanical efficiency suited to a style of eating designed to take in nutrition while artillery fire made up the background music.

"So. Solus," she said, putting down her salad fork. "Like I said, he's a fixer, a go-between. He doesn't actually do or sell anything himself, but acts as a middleman to put his clients in touch with other people who can do or provide what the clients need. For a fee, of course."

"Of course. And that would include, for example, hiring a team of hunters from the Guild," Ryland said in between bites.

"Of course," Karen agreed. "Most of the time it isn't an issue, but if there's a job where WORKS didn't want the hunters to know who was hiring them, or if it might compromise what Father was doing to be observed talking with the Guild, then someone like Solus would be used to conceal what was happening."

"Like that business with the _Gran Squall_ a couple of years ago, where the military used a travel agency as the front for finding their crashed ship."

Karen winced at the reference. The _Gran Squall_ 's passenger, Rupika, had been central to Leo Grahart's last, desperate plan, one that he'd barely gotten away from with his life, but with his power base shattered. Possibly, Ryland decided, it had not been the best choice of examples to pick.

"Yes," she said. "Exactly like that."

It was his turn to wince, at the terse tone in her voice. He considered apologizing, but there wasn't much point to it now. She knew that he knew he'd screwed up, and it wouldn't fix anything for Karen if he repeated it out loud.

"Did Solus have any preferred clients?" he took his only course and turned the subject back to safe ground.

"Not really; he had a variety of employers. A man like him loses his value if he comes to be just a front for a single entity."

"No point in hiding your identity, then. Though it would still offer plausible deniability from a legal standpoint."

"That could be important, but it isn't likely to be vital. When it comes time to pay the piper, things tend not to be settled by any kind of official action. Proof and evidence are important only in how they can sway neutral parties to your side in these back-room conflicts."

"Even so, there's some value in it."

"True."

"But despite that, you figure that Solus is a truly free agent?"

She didn't answer him at once, but pondered the question seriously. He took the chance to take another forkful of his salad.

"I wouldn't go that far," she said. "I've never heard of him working for any of the corporate interests—Weinstine, P2E, Vise Corp., none of them. And his dealings with criminal syndicates tend to be on the back end."

"You mean, he'd put a client in touch with thugs, weapons dealers, e-men, or whatever, but he wouldn't actually have one of the syndicates as a client?"

"Right. Solus stuck with more official interests to back his paycheck. Which isn't stupid; _Pioneer 2_ 's a closed circle. Here on the ship it's the officials who have the power, even though it's divided up among the three factions."

"And within them. But yes, if he wants money and influence, they're who's going to get it for him if anyone is."

Unfortunately, that did very little to narrow down the question of who was in back of Solus. There seemed to only be one way to follow that trail.

"How would I get in touch with him? I assume it's not just a matter of looking him up in the directory and making a link call, though that would be kind of refreshing."

Karen nodded.

"Yeah, he tries to keep a low profile, as much as you can on this ship. I actually think that he runs multiple identities, so he can disappear into one without revealing himself, and without having to live Downtown among the people he doesn't want to associate with."

"So is there any chance you can help me?"

"I'm guessing that you're not hiring him?"

"He actually hired us, and I'm getting very interested as to why."

"Hm. In which case, I strongly suspect that he will not want to speak with you. His clients' business is his currency, and their trust is why he continues to get work. Don't get me wrong, but I don't want to be associated with setting him up for you, either. It's the kind of thing that would affect my own credibility for hiring contacts like him in the future."

"Is that a no, then?"

She shook her head.

"It's an 'I'll have to be careful how I handle this.' If I can work out a way, I'll help."

"Using a cut-out to get to a cut-out," Ryland said, setting his fork down on the now-empty plate. "This business just gets more twisted by the minute."

Karen saluted him with her glass and drained off the last of her drink.

"Congratulations, Ryland. Welcome to business as usual on board _Pioneer 2_."

As if he'd been waiting for Ryland to finish his salad, and perhaps he had, the waiter appeared like a silent ghost, bearing their entrees and Karen's fresh drink. The space caused by the enforced silence made Ryland think. "Business as usual" summed the situation up nicely. He'd seen this kind of thing before, of course, plots and spying and go-betweens, and it was never simple. Getting Solus to talk wouldn't be easy, and figuring out what he was caught in the middle of even less so.

And there was something else, too, something that was bothering him. It wasn't anything specific, just a nagging sensation at the back of his mind that somewhere, some way he was forgetting something.

He hated that feeling. The kind of things it went along with always seemed to be the kind that came back to bite him later on.

~X X X~

There was no sound of a shot, just the slap of Rahn Solus's shoes on the floor, the harsh wheeze of the thickset man's breath as his chest heaved with every stride—and the grinding sound of a chunk being taken out of the corner wall even as he rounded it.

 _Suppressed Gun_ , he thought even as panic filled him. Probably it was the brain defending itself against the fear of his situation by latching onto a fine detail. Solus didn't use weapons in his regular life, he wasn't a soldier or a hunter, but he knew the business well enough that he knew how the weapon worked. Otherwise looking like a normal handgun, it featured a barrel extension that both rechanneled some of the Photon energy leakage back into the shot, increasing its power, and reducing the sound of the weapon's firing. He'd made many deals arranging for such guns to get into the hands of clients. They were especially popular for firing single shots into a crowded area, so the noise didn't draw the attention of witnesses to the shooter.

Some people might take the position that it was only rough (and possibly inevitable) justice that Solus found himself on the receiving end after years working for people who would care about what it took to best shoot someone in a crowd. He didn't share that belief, especially since his clients' own experiences tended to negate any idea of divine punishment for sins committed. Besides which, the circumstances didn't even match up. Shots in a crowd? Solus would have been extremely happy to see a crowd right about then, be it for witnesses to get his pursuer to back off, for someone to help him, or if all else failed just to provide some obstacles he could use to put between himself and the line of fire. Getting _to_ someplace where there was a crowd was a major goal of his at that point.

He was afraid, though, that the hope was futile.

Solus clutched at his side, at the stitch that was building up from his under-exercised body forced to go at full speed for too long. His breaths were long and ragged and his heart pounded in his chest like a triphammer. The bitter thought struck him that if this kept up his enemies wouldn't _need_ to hunt him down and shoot him; the heart attack would do the job for them. Part of him even wondered if that was the _plan_ , as another shot struck at his heels, to course him to death like a wounded game animal.

 _But why?_ That was the worst of it. Certainly, he'd been involved in any number of transactions in which there would be an irate victim bent on revenge, but he was just the middleman. They wouldn't know about him. They wouldn't even be aware he was involved—certainly, never to believe that he was the prime mover. There was no one who would point dramatically and say, "Rahn Solus, I will have my vengeance on you!"

And yet, here he was, racing through empty corridors of an abandoned building with a killer on his trail.

Now he wished he hadn't come here. Had there been anything he should have seen? Anything suspicious in the communication that would have given it away if he'd just looked more closely?

"Gah!"

He gave a yelp of pain as his knee collided with another corner as he rounded it. Solus was winded, staggering, the stitch in his side growing to an agonizing, wrenching pain matching the fresh pain in his knee. From behind him came the steady, measured footfalls of his pursuer, someone who obviously was in better condition. He grabbed the edge of the next corner with his hand and used the leverage to fling himself around it just as another shot whipped past, shattering a darkened display terminal.

He found himself at the top of a staircase. _Yes!_ His flight had been basically a pell-mell rush, but hurtling in the direction of one of the doors, perhaps even subconsciously. If he recalled correctly, there was a street-level entrance three levels down, if he could only reach it…

Solus's pursuer seemed to recognize the urgency as well. The twisting flights of the stairwell would impede line-of-sight, provide cover, and the following footsteps soon grew faster, more desperate. More shots came, multiples this time, in three-round bursts, smashing into walls, railing, steps.

"Don't make this harder than it has to be!" a male voice rang out.

That was the first piece of good news Solus had encountered since he'd arrived. Though he wasn't in the business himself, he'd associated with enough thugs, hunters, and soldiers over his career to know that their type didn't start barking like that when things were going well. Rather, it was a sign that they _weren't_ , and that they wanted to shortcut the process by intimidating their quarry into giving up.

It meant that there was hope.

Throat burning, chest heaving, Solus found the energy to push on faster, hurtling down the stairs at such an out-of-control pace that any more speed and he'd be unable to maintain his balance, unable to keep getting his feet underneath his body fast enough to actually keep moving. He seized the rail at the end of each half-flight, using it and his arm to swing himself around so that he didn't cannon into the wall; it actually felt like he'd wrenched his shoulder the second time but at that point one more ache was nothing. All that mattered was that he _did not stop_ , for he knew that if he did he'd never be able to get himself moving again, and the sounds of pieces being chewed out of walls and steps behind him whenever his pursuer got a glimpse were sharp reminders of the cost of _that._

 _There!_

He crashed through the street-level door out of the stairwell, thankfully marked as he'd already lost count of the flights. It swung open beneath his weight, the automatic control apparently off since these levels of the building were not in use but the door left unlocked for manual access. Fire-safety codes, no doubt, making sure that an emergency escape was still a viable possibility.

 _Focus! Run!_ Solus told himself desperately as he raced into the corridor. The stairs opened into the side of a hall and he hurtled across its width without being able to hold up, barely turning his body so his shoulder crashed into the wall opposite rather than hitting face-first. Pushing himself, he got going in the direction he was facing before he lost all his momentum, hoping that he was going the right way.

Behind him, he heard the door slam open, obviously with his pursuer bursting out after him, and suddenly fear clamped around Solus's heart. The corridor was long and straight. There weren't obstacles or barriers, no twists and turns to put a wall between himself and the shooter.

He was nothing but a sitting duck, a target in a shooting gallery.

"Aaagh!"

How right he was, was proven in the next moment as a stab of white-hot pain tore through his left side, the Photon round ripping through skin and muscle. Blood gushed, hot and wet, from the fist-sized hole, but Solus didn't even slow up. If anything, the pain seemed to energize him with a shot of adrenaline, pushing him faster, harder. Shock and blood loss could be treated at a medical center, after all—but only if he escaped to reach emergency care.

The pain melded into that which he already felt, the burning in his lungs and throat, the way his heart hammered as if it wanted to batter itself out of his chest, the searing ache of muscles pushed well beyond their normal limits. What the injury really fed was the fear, the first-hand, immediate horror of death. Solus had sent many hunters into the teeth of that fear, but never tasted it himself, not until now.

 _There!_

The corridor opened up suddenly, and he burst out into the building's street-level lobby. He could see the glass doors ahead, and pushed on towards them, a lurching run. They'd either open for him or he'd smash straight through, but either way he wasn't going to stop, not here!

The shadow that slid into his path did so coolly, smoothly, from next to the reception desk. His arm whipped out in a backhand arc, the barrel of the man's pistol crashing into the side of Solus's head and raking down the fixer's cheek.

The blow was a heavy one, and though it was just a crude bludgeoning hit, Solus wasn't wearing a Photon frame that could absorb any of the impact. It staggered him, stars seemed to burst nova in his vision, and as he reeled, the sudden loss of momentum finished him. Stopped, he was a spent force; he didn't have the energy to overcome his own inertia. The pain swelled in his chest, seeming to explode within him, and he collapsed, going over onto his back.

The one who'd been chasing Solus came running up, feet pattering on the floor. The two of them wore the same uniform, and the curious thought drifted through Solus's mind of wishing he knew why these people wanted him dead. It was a vague, colorless thing, though, without any real emotion. The black numbness was swallowing him up.

"I can't believe you let him get this far."

"Yeah, well, it didn't do him any good, did it? Looks like he burnt himself out just making it here."

"Let's just make sure nobody gets cute. They go and Reverser his ass and it's ours on the firing line instead."

He leveled the barrel of the gun at Solus's forehead. By inflicting enough damage to the brain, he could prevent emergency resuscitation methods from bringing the dead man back to life. Photon technology could do what previous generations would have deemed a miracle.

Three nearly soundless trigger pulls made certain Rahn Solus wouldn't be getting one.


	5. Chapter 5

Irene Seda, Lyon reflected, almost seemed to have a little bit of android in her, so far as her appearance went. She must have had several identical copies of the white-and-green outfit she wore like a uniform; the inefficiency of washing it daily would not have suited her personality and the idea of her _not_ being immaculately turned out was basically unthinkable. Indeed, Lyon actually did know several androids who did change their appearance more than Irene, despite the expense of a carapace refit.

Idly, she wondered if there was something in that which helped explain why the hunter and the Principal's secretary and chief aide got along so well.

In any event, the blonde woman looked every bit as pressed, primped, and tidy at 875.9 beats as she did at 350 in the morning, despite putting in over four hundred fifty beats at the office.

Lyon didn't mention any of that. She knew her friend well enough to know that it was a matter of professional pride, not something praiseworthy but what she considered part of her duties as Colin Tyrell's right-hand woman.

"You make it easy to play hostess," Irene said, stepping back from the door to allow Lyon into her residence. "I never have to worry about offering you any refreshments."

The foyer and the main living area behind it, though, were not harsh or professional, but reflected a soft comfort. Cream, lemon yellow, and pale sky blue were the dominant colors, holo-panels on the walls displayed images of abstract art, and throw pillows were scattered in the corners of the sofa and soft chairs.

"Just don't invite my partner unless you want to get stuck in a bad joke about it not being a secretary's job to make coffee," Lyon said, and was rewarded with a small smile.

"I'll try to watch out for that. But come on in. From what you said on the link, this sounded like business rather than a friendly chat. Speaking of which, I am sorry I had to cancel our handball match last Thursday."

Lyon shrugged.

"Work happens. I've had to cancel on you often enough. And for pretty much the same reason. There can't be much difference between a rabid Booma attack and a Council session."

Irene made a face.

"The sad part is that I think you're right."

"Honestly, given the options, I'll take the Boomas. At least with them, they come after you in straight lines instead of circling around to your back, and if things get too out of hand, you can just go ahead and shoot them."

Irene laughed.

"I won't mention that to Principal Tyrell. It might be too tempting one of these days!"

"Especially since it would also help out with any problems Resource Distribution is having!" Lyon joked, but this time it fell flat, the grin wiping itself off Irene's face in an instant.

"Lyon, where did you hear about that?"

"Where did I hear about what?" Parsing her last sentence, she picked out the obvious probability. "Do you mean, Resource Distribution having problems?"

"Yes, that. Who told you?"

That was certainly a surprising question.

"No one. I was just using it as an example of something extra in the joke, that's all. I thought it was just common knowledge that there are issues."

Irene's eyebrows went up.

"Common knowledge?"

"Of course. Supplies of certain goods are growing scarcer, prices are going up. I think everyone takes it for granted that there are problems. I mean, _Pioneer 2_ was supposed to take us on a two-year trip to Ragol, but we've been here in orbit two and a half years beyond that. It's only logical that there would be problems sooner or later."

She reflected that she'd sounded an awful lot like Ryland there, perhaps illustrating the "come to resemble your long-term partner" theory.

Ryland-like or not, the explanation produced a deep sigh from Irene.

"I spend far too much of my time among the same circle of people, I think."

She walked over to the couch and settled on one corner, turning sideways. Lyon followed her and took the chair which best filled Irene's line of vision.

"It's funny when you stop to think about it. We government officers are scrambling around trying to keep a secret, work behind the scenes to solve a problem before it gets out, and it's so obvious that people already know all about it."

"You didn't realize that the news was out?"

She gave a rueful little chuckle.

"No, I didn't. Sad, isn't it? When you brought it up, I was sure that there had been a leak in our security. It only goes to show how insular my life can be, away from the everyday reality of the general population." She frowned then, her mouth pinched as if she had tasted something bitter. "I hope that this doesn't reflect the attitudes of the Administration as a whole."

"You mean, it's one thing for political factions to work towards differing goals that suit their individual needs, but something else entirely to be making their decisions out of ignorance."

"That…expresses it a bit bluntly, but yes."

Lyon shrugged.

"You know how it is better than I do. If it's any consolation, most people I know figure that the government is made up of political hacks who lie, steal, and cover things up for the sake of their own careers, instead of incompetent boobs who don't know any better."

For a moment, Lyon thought that Irene was going to be offended at that, but the blonde just gave up and laughed.

"Better to be corrupt and shortsighted than stupid, then?"

"At least if the problem is corruption, there's a chance they might get their act together and do the right thing if self-interest says so. If they're just stupid there's no hope at all."

"And if they're both corrupt and stupid?"

"Then I'd say we've got some problems."

"I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Lyon."

"I'd smirk, but that's too depressing a thought to smile over."

"They're just so short-sighted!" Irene exclaimed, her cool cracking at last. "It isn't even that they're politicians, but that they're always interested in the immediate benefit. So many of them would rather have a hundred meseta today than a thousand next week."

"I'll remember that if I ever need to bribe someone."

Her joke worked; Irene chuckled, breaking the flow of her building rant.

"But you didn't come by to hear me complain about the politics of _Pioneer 2_ , though it's too bad you didn't, as it seems I could go on all night. What did you want to ask?"

Lyon folded her hands in her lap.

"It's to do with a job that Ryland and I were working on this morning."

"Oh? Did you need something by way of follow-up?"

"Well, yes and no. That is, we did our job, and it's over and done with, but we're concerned about the circumstances. A rival hunter was killed on Ragol."

"I'm sorry to hear it." She was being sincere about it, too, Lyon knew, not just giving the stock answer. Principal Tyrell would have agreed; Irene and her boss alike saw hunters fighting hunters as a tragic waste. The Guild represented _Pioneer 2_ 's best hope to them, people who could be heroes, and those with the strength to fight but weren't beholden to any particular political faction.

Knowing that, it made Lyon feel bad that she'd mentioned it.

"We're worried that it might be the beginning of something, more than just politics as usual."

"Is that actually possible? I mean, politics as usual is kind of a catchall term, right up to and including the disaster with Leo Grahart's mini-rebellion."

"You're turning into a very cynical woman, Irene."

"It's a hazard of the job, I think. But in all seriousness, what's bothering you?"

"On the job we just finished, the other hunter I mentioned, Selfas Kane, killed himself in order to prevent my team from retrieving certain target data. He took it with him to the bottom of the sea."

"I see. Can you tell me what it was about?"

"No, and without even getting near the ethical questions; I just don't know. In fact, that's what Ryland and I are trying to find out."

"Can you tell me whom you're working for, then?"

"No one."

Irene's eyebrows raised.

"I'm not sure I understand. You said that you were on a job when this Kane killed himself."

Lyon nodded.

"We were, but that's over now. We're acting strictly on our own, now, because what happened didn't make sense, at least not in the context of what we currently know, and it bothered us. Primarily, it bothered me. Ryland enjoys the mystery aspect of it, of course, but he's mostly participating out of friendship."

Simply speaking of the fact—that it had been important enough to mention to a third party outside the immediate context—triggered a fractional increase in the emotional impact of Ryland's act.

"I see, and you're telling me because the passion to sacrifice one's own life for the job, especially in a hunter, suggests a kind of passion that might mean serious trouble for _Pioneer 2_."

"And because being at the heart of the Administration, you would have as good an idea as any what factions or political interests might be building towards that kind of passion. There's a big difference, sometimes, in what can move people to act and what can't."

"True," Irene allowed, then turned away, not actually turning her back on Lyon but not facing her, either.

"What is it?" Obviously, she had thought of something, but just as obviously she was having trouble deciding what, exactly, to say.

"Lyon, do you remember how the Resource Distribution problems were general knowledge and that surprised me? Well, there's something else, something that I don't think is yet public knowledge, at least not outside the circles that are directly involved."

"What?"

"I'm trying to decide whether or not to tell you."

"Oh." She hadn't quite considered that possibility. She _should_ have, since she knew full well that Irene was not only an Administration employee, subject to all of its rules concerning confidentiality, but owed her _personal_ loyalty very strongly to Principal Tyrell over and above her job. She would not disclose confidential information to Lyon just out of friendship, not unless she believed there was good reason, and a nebulous, speculative terrorist threat was only good enough for paranoids.

Or for people who had a lot more information about what might actually be going on.

"And you can't tell me who your client was or what the nature of the data you were after was?" Irene verified.

"Can't in the literal sense of the word. Like I said, I just don't know."

Irene frowned. Lyon sympathized; obviously Irene _wanted_ to help but felt herself bound by the regulations. And honestly, Lyon wasn't inclined to complain despite the inconveniences; it was nice that _somebody_ in _Pioneer 2_ 's government was actually doing her job according to the rules.

"Ah!" Irene took out her PDL and started typing briskly. In a moment she put it back away and smiled—no, _smirked_ was closer.

"You said that you're investigating this on your own, that you don't presently have a client?"

"That's right."

"Well, now you do. I just registered the quest with the Guild, with a specific request for your and Ryland's services."

"You're a genius."

Irene shrugged.

"It isn't the first time. Remember the White Day bombing last year?"

"Oh, good point. Well, you're still smart for remembering." Lyon took out her PDL and contacted the Hunter's Guild. Sure enough, the listing was there when she logged in. She quickly registered her acceptance of the job.

"One hundred meseta?" she couldn't help but tease Irene.

"A nominal fee seems appropriate for a job you're already doing for free, plus it's justifiable on our end for following up on a tip that's nothing more than speculation. Consider the terms: 'Investigate the suicide of Selfas Kane and determine if it implicates a threat to the security of _Pioneer 2_.' If there's a necessary follow-up, we can actually negotiate that later. Besides, it's not every day an informant pays _you_ to give you information."

"Well, that's true enough. So, now that I'm officially working for the Administration to fight a possible terrorist threat, why don't you tell me what I might be potentially involved with?"

"Independence."

"For whom? And from what?"

"There have been serious discussions about _Pioneer 2_ breaking away from Coral."

Lyon wished for a moment that she had organic-model eyes, so that she could widen them and stare in shock.

"Wait, but…how…is it even possible?"

"We're two years away from Coral by FTL spaceflight. The only thing we exchange with people back home is talk. And all _that_ seems to do is destabilize things more, inspiring factional strife that has nothing to do with our attempts to settle on Ragol. There are so many people here, seeking a new home, new hope for the future, and we're burdening them with political infighting that's not even from this planet!"

She made a sour face before she continued.

"Of course, not everyone making those arguments is as high-minded as they make it sound. After all, if _Pioneer 2_ becomes independent, it'll upset the political applecart here. Any person or group whose power base is centered around its links to Coral would find their influence drastically reduced, while those who have significant presence here would gain correspondingly. And then there are valid counterarguments as well. Aren't we supposed to be the leading edge of a colonization wave? There's at least a possibility of that happening in the future, though we still have a long way to go, especially with the ongoing Dark Falz problem. What happens if the next ship arrives—and if it contains a punitive military expedition? Do we have the right to threaten the long-term survival of our homeworld over political grievances, even if those grievances are serious and legitimate?"

Lyon shook her head, not in disagreement but to indicate confusion.

"It's all too much of a mess for me to sort out. I would have to assign values to the abstract concepts such as the right to liberty and the importance of loyalty, then have reliable data as to the probability of various outcomes and their consequences both in terms of abstract values and in more practical, tangible results. I'm literally returning an 'insufficient data to determine' result when I try to decide for myself if pursuing independence is or isn't a good idea."

"And that is why we need more androids, or for that matter any androids, in our political bodies."

"I'll tell you, though, you're completely right about one thing. The independence question is exactly the kind of matter that would lead to terrorism and violence. Those abstract concepts I mentioned are perfect examples of the kind of thing that you organics are inclined to put absolute values on. Slogans like 'liberty or death' or 'my country above all' are all too common in history."

"Yes, and those fanatics are prime fodder for politicians to give strength to their ambitions, the shock troops of a movement—right up until they end up driving the movement instead, and sweeping the tide of history ahead of it. Worse, there are two other problems pushing the independence question, issues that have forced it to the forefront of discussion. One we've already talked about, the resource situation."

"And the other?"

"The Ten-Nation Alliance on Coral is breaking up."

" _What_? But they're the backers of the Pioneer Project!"

"Exactly. And that leaves it as an open question just who or what is going to _be_ the Coral government that we answer to. Dol Grisen is using this in a two-pronged attack to build support for independence behind the scenes: on the one hand, what help can we count on from a homeworld in chaos, and on the other hand, how much damage will we suffer getting caught up in schemes that have nothing to do with us but play out here?"

Lyon shook her head again.

"I can't believe it—and yet, when I compare the situation to historical data about the strife on Coral, it makes perfect sense."

Irene signed and bowed her head.

"I hate to admit it, but you are completely correct. Human history is full of violence. We seem to turn on each other at the slightest provocation, wreaking destruction upon each other, the very planet that we live on. Perhaps that is why we created Newmen and androids, so that we could trust our future to beings different than us, with better priorities."

"To improve the human race through technology where religion and philosophy have failed? I think I'll leave the existential questions up to Ryland, if you don't mind."

"I'm sorry to burden you with them. It's the frustration of the job, I think, that and seeing the same conflicts play out on the Council and between the Administration, military, and Lab. Sometimes it feels like all we're doing is just repeating the same old mistakes. They say that Dark Falz revives in a millennial cycle of destruction, and so often it seems like we're trying to imitate it."

Lyon made a mental note that she should never accept a political appointment should one come her way.

"I don't think it's that bad, Irene."

"Maybe not, but it's bad enough. There's good reason why I think it's worth following up your hunch about this Kane and sharing restricted information—which, by the way, you're not to spread. I understand that far too many people have their own sources and the rumor mill is what it is, but let's try not to make things any worse. We'd like to refrain from any official announcements until we've settled on a suitable response."

"Present the problem and the solution together, instead of as a separate incident, so as to prevent worry and trouble."

Irene nodded.

"Exactly, and at the same time build confidence in the government, to let people know that they were in safe hands, rather than being kept in suspense by the delay."

"I think the lack of an official announcement over the Ragol landing delay and the loss of _Pioneer 1_ sank that ship before it sailed," Lyon pointed out.

"The dissatisfaction with that among the people is one more reason for the factional strife," Irene admitted.

"Well, if what you say is true, and I don't doubt that it is, we're going to have a lot more going on here than factional strife. It could end up with all-out war in the streets if the government can't resolve things cleanly."

"I know. And there's all too many people out there who haven't made up their mind where they stand on any of the issues, or if they have they aren't telling. Foremost among them is Lab Chief Milarose."

Lyon felt her face tighten into a scowl in an automatic response to the emotion that had surfaced at the mention of the name. She'd done a job for the Lab once, the one where she'd met Ryland, in fact, where she'd been set up to "coincidentally" expose a secret military operation. Their subsequent encounters had been enough to convince Lyon that while Chief Milarose might not be the _enemy_ , she was nonetheless a consummate schemer, twisted enough to meet herself halfway coming around corners, as it were.

"What about Principal Tyrell?"

"He favors a wait-and-see approach at this time. He was at least sympathetic to the independence movement, but isn't willing to commit without a better idea of what's going to happen on Coral and what it will mean for us. Not unlike what your own algorithms are returning, in fact."

"Well, I can't deny, then, that it sounds like good sense, except…are you sure that we're going to have that luxury?"

Irene's lips twisted into a half-smile, sardonic and a little sad.

"Well…isn't that the point of what you're going to find out for us?"


	6. Chapter 6

The incessant beep of Ryland's PDL dragged him out of a sound sleep. Blinking, he rolled over in bed and groped at the nightstand for his spectacles. Putting them on, he noted the time (251.3 beats) and pressed the answer button. Karen Grahart's face appeared, the soldier looking as sharply pressed as she had at dinner the night before.

"Karen?" he murmured blearily, trying to blink the sleep away. "What's going on?"

"I sent out some feelers on that favor you asked me about," she said. "It turns out that Rahn Solus was murdered last night. Just what the hell have you gotten me into this time, Ryland?"

~X X X~

"I have been reviewing the schematics," the voice from the screen reported, "and it appears that it may in fact be possible to salvage the test data."

"Wait a minute," Almonte said. "I thought that wasn't an option."

"I had initially considered that to be the case. Indeed, that was the original function of the system design. However, after conducting a further analysis, that does not seem to be the case."

Sena folded her arms over her chest and cocked her head to one side, a suspicious look on her face.

"Well, now, isn't that _convenient_."

The target of her sarcasm was apparently impervious.

"Yes, it is. Without this capability, months of our efforts would have been lost." 

From behind the two researchers, another voice spoke up. Today, the project director was in the lab.

"Let's hear more about this solution."

"As you are aware, regardless of the memory storage method used, that data must first be compiled. That is, it has to come from somewhere originally. I believe that it would be possible to perform a sector-by-sector analysis using direct Photon induction to reconstruct the data from the remnant 'ghost,' as it were, left in the system itself."

"That's impossible!" Almonte yelped.

"Not necessarily," the director countered. Being an expert in the field, after all, was the reason the director held the position. "It's theoretically quite possible, but would take a team of trained experts several months working around the clock. The endeavor is certainly worthwhile, but we would never get the approval."

"I agree, which is why I suggested that I handle the task personally."

"You believe that you could do the work faster?"

"Indeed. It would require direct access, but by incorporating the device's system into a larger network of computers, the processing power could be applied simultaneously to large portions of the entire test machine at once."

"Directly connected," the director mused.

"You'd have to go down to Ragol," Almonte said. "The machine would have to be disassembled to bring back up, otherwise, and if I understand correctly, that would break Photon cohesion."

"Correct. Traces would still be present, but reconstructing them into a unified whole would no longer be feasible, and moreover would be entirely too speculative to convince anyone of anything."

"But is that even possible? You going to Ragol?" Sena asked.

"Perhaps not physically, but remote access _is_ possible."

"The CALS terminals!" Almonte exclaimed. "They were set up all over Gal Da Val Island to give Lab operatives computer access. We could deploy a similar terminal and physically hook it up to the test machine."

"I think you people are forgetting something," Sena pointed out. "CALS controls the communications network between _Pioneer 2_ and Gal Da Val. We'd either have to use conventional BEE, which I don't think can handle the necessary data load, set up a competing network, for which we don't have the hardware, or use theirs. And if you think Chief Milarose is going to let this go ahead if she gets wind of what's going on, well!"

"I will have to consider this further," the director said. "Sena, Winston, get to work on preparing the terminal. As for you," he continued, turning to the screen and its pattern of swirling colors, "see if you can figure out something to do about the communications problem. We've all put a lot of time and effort into this project, and if we lose out now...well, everyone here knows exactly what that could mean for all of _Pioneer 2_."

~X X X~

It wasn't hard for Lyon and Ryland to find a docking slot for their aerocar. Downtown wasn't home to a lot of aerocars at all; the real risk was that the locals would bypass security and strip it bare by the time they were done. Given the number of military police vehicles gathered around, the risk seemed fairly low. Strobing red and blue lights cast the scene in weird hues as the hunters approached.

Inspector Laleham, the milipol's chief homicide investigator, was entering notes on a dataplate as they drew near. His square jaw was dusted with stubble, no doubt because he'd been roused from sleep just like Ryland, only earlier. Murder never seemed to conveniently wait for office hours. What caught Ryland by surprise, though, were the number of gray whiskers among the brown; when he'd first met the Inspector there'd been nary a one.

Given the stress of Laleham's job, and the sheer frustration at the futility of it all he had to wrestle with so often, perhaps it wasn't surprising that it had taken its toll.

"Morning, Inspector," Ryland called as they approached, walking between uniformed police agents. "I won't say 'good,' given the circumstances."

Laleham glanced up from his dataplate, and at the sight of the hunters his features settled into a scowl.

"You two. I should have known."

"That hardly seems pleasant, even given the early hour and unconscionable lack of coffee."

The Inspector pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I'm a little busy right now, Ryland. You'll have to excuse me."

"I know you're busy; that's why we're here. The murder of Rahn Solus."

Laleham shook his head once, sharply.

"No comment."

Ryland pushed his spectacles up his nose.

"Wait, what?"

"No. Comment. I don't know what you've heard or where from, but the death of Rahn Solus has been officially determined by the military police to be an accident. We aren't treating anything as a homicide."

Ryland waggled a finger at the Inspector.

"You may want to reexamine that conclusion. While I'm sure that this was well-disguised to _look_ like an accident—" Someone in the crowd sniggered. "—I don't believe that it was entirely coincidental that Solus was killed the very night after he hired us for an extremely suspicious piece of work, about which we were trying to find out more."

Laleham gave him a sour look of disgust, and Ryland prepared himself for the usual complaints about how the policeman hated the kinds of cases Ryland got involved with, chock full of tricky conspiracies and plots that made arresting the villains and administering justice difficult or even impossible.

That wasn't what he got.

"Maybe you didn't hear me, Ryland. This investigation is over."

"Can you at least let us see—"

"No, I can't. The matter's closed. I've let you poke around things in the past, getting involved in official police business, but that's over and done with right here. There is no case, there is no file to poke through, there's _nothing_. Now get out of here before I have you arrested for interfering with the police in the execution of their duties."

Lyon took a step forward then, coming up alongside Ryland, and the Force was convinced that his partner was about to ream Laleham out in truly epic fashion, but he put his hand on Lyon's arm to forestall her.

"Let's just go," he said when she turned to him in surprise. "There's nothing more for us to do here."

"Good to see you're learning," Laleham said, then turned his back and began entering data again. The hunters, too, turned and walked away, more than one member of the milipol smirking at them as they did. It wasn't often, after all, that they got to see one of their own tear into one of the Hunter's Guild and have it stand. Generally it was the other way around, with hunters retreating behind Guild extraterritoriality and being the ones doing the smirking.

Understanding the emotion didn't make it particularly easy to bear, though, and Ryland's back seemed to burn with the weight of the stares on it. He could tell that Lyon was seething as she marched along next to him, but she held her peace until they returned to their aerocar and were seated inside.

"What the hell was that?" she snapped, bashing her fist against the inside of the door. "After all the incidents we've helped him resolve over the years, where does he get off treating us like that? Your request wasn't even out of line for a near stranger, but for a regular contact, someone you've had an ongoing working relationship with nearly since _Pioneer 2_ left Coral, it's unconscionable!"

"It isn't like he had a choice."

"What does that mean?"

"He as good as said it directly: he's operating under orders."

"Orders? To act like a giant jackass?"

Ryland couldn't help but be fascinated with how a machine, a wholly artificial entity, could feel angry and insulted, have a sense of fair play to be offended and pride to be hurt.

"To cover up the murder."

She stared at him.

"Cover up?"

"He as good as told us. How did he say it, 'we aren't treating it as a homicide'?"

"'We aren't treating anything,' actually, but the meaning's the same."

"And not once did he say 'I think' or 'I believe' or anything of the sort. It was all 'we' or declarations like 'has been determined by the military police.' He doesn't buy the story; I doubt the story's even credible if you saw the body. It's just a flat-out lie he's been ordered to tell."

"He didn't have to be such a jerk about it, though."

"Actually, he probably did. How many of the men and women there would report back up the chain of command if they saw the Inspector talking to hunters? The Guild isn't exactly the military's best friend, and whatever is going on, the higher-ups obviously take it seriously."

Ryland leaned forward, tapping the button to boot up their aerocar.

"You think he has a spy on his squad?"

He shrugged.

"Probably more than one."

They disengaged from the docking slot and moved out into traffic.

"The problem with these political cases is that the police is a sub-branch of the military; it's right in the name. The Administration doesn't control an armed force of its own, which is one reason why it maintains such a close relationship with us in the Guild," he continued.

"Not entirely," Lyon amended that. "The principal is an ex-Hunter and his daughter Red Ring Rico was one, too. There's a direct connection there apart from political concerns."

"True enough," Ryland noted as the traffic channel sent them rising higher, away from Downtown. "But the rest of the Council and the bureaucratic middlemen do the same unless they've got direct ties to the military in some way. The Lab has IntSec when they need muscle, but the Administration has to go to their political rivals, or to a group of individuals hired on an ad-hoc basis—us."

"Separation of powers, 'we all hate each other' style."

"Right, so there's a conflict of interest every time one of these cases comes along, Laleham's complained about it to us before, about how orders will come down the chain of command and he'll end up being screwed out of the chance to do his job because everything got resolved behind the scenes."

"Now _that_ I remember."

"He's a policeman. His motivation is to catch criminals and keep the citizens safe. He doesn't care about the political nonsense, but he's still a military officer, still under orders, and he has a duty to obey his superiors. And in a case like this, it's pretty certain that if he ever tried to step out of line, they'd come down on him like a hammer."

"It's interesting. I appreciate all that, and I even feel sorry for him being stuck between a rock and a hard place, his duty and his sincere desire as a policeman. Meanwhile, I still want to punch him in the nose."

"I wouldn't recommend it."

"No, but having conflicted emotions is complicated. I'm glad that it doesn't cause a response slowdown the way it would in early-model androids due to the chains of input going into my reaction."

"That would be kind of weird."

"It's why early-model androids will only react based on primary, or primary and secondary priorities. Any less important concerns are dismissed as too remote. It makes their personalities seem more flat and machine-like, and would often lead to errors in behavior, such as neglecting a mission objective while accomplishing a more important one, because they were literally unable to process the lower-ranked goal while choosing their actions. The greatest utility of Photon-based computing in androids was to expand the decision trees to establish the importance of dozens of layered factors simultaneously without time lag, the way an organic's brain does. But back on topic, if the milipol isn't there to investigate the crime, why did they have a full team?"

"To sanitize the area, destroying any evidence that might counter the official story and insure that their spurious record is the only one that exists."

"And Karen Grahart knew that Solus was murdered because her contacts primarily are military, so she learned it from some level above Laleham."

"That's the way I read it," Ryland agreed.

"Then we know now that it was the military that killed Solus."

"Not necessarily."

"It was the military that gave Inspector Laleham and his men the orders. There's no other way about it."

Ryland nodded.

"I agree. Laleham wouldn't turn away from his duty to investigate the crime for anything other than a direct order through the military chain of command, properly verified as a valid order and not someone playing a private game."

"Then why would the military be covering up a crime they didn't commit?"

"There's any number of possible reasons. Mind you, it's entirely possible, even likely, that they silenced Solus, but it's also possible that they have a stake in whatever political game Solus is involved with, which I'm going to guess has to be our job and Kane's data, and they're trying to keep it quiet to keep any third parties from horning in."

Lyon thought that one over, even going so far as to cup her chin in her hand to indicate that she was doing so.

"It's possible," she allowed. "But it seems somewhat remote. It seems more likely that they'd be covering up their own crime instead of someone else's."

"Not necessarily. The existence of a cover-up might be to dodge blame, but it also might just be to avoid _publicity_. Solus's killer, if not the military, might want that publicity, noise, chaos, embarrassment, public attention. Some of the most effective ways of boxing in a political entity involve putting a spotlight on them."

"Fine," Lyon...Ryland would have said "harrumphed" if she'd been organic. "We'll leave the matter open."

"What we do know, though, is that the military is an active player in this business. Whether they were Solus's clients, killed Solus, both, or neither, they're involved in what's going on. And it's not just some individual playing a lone hand or a subfaction like WORKS. We know Laleham well enough by now that we know he wouldn't go along with the order to cover up a homicide unless it came right from the top or close to it, through legitimate and verified chains of command. The only question is, what's important enough about all this to have them acting so overtly?"

"Well, I might be able to help with that."

"Oh; did you learn something from Irene?" Ryland had filled Lyon in on his talk with Karen Grahart on the way to the crime scene, as background for how he'd found out about the death. It seemed like the other half of the partners' evening had worked out at all.

"I did. Though, there was a price."

"I'm guessing you didn't mean in cash."

She nodded.

"Correct. Well, at least, not in terms of us paying her. In fact, we've been hired by the Administration."

He looked at her in surprise.

"We have?"

"That's right. It was her condition for disclosing confidential information to us. As hunters working for the Council, we have a valid need to know the information, as deep background on our job."

"All right, but what exactly _is_ our job?"

"To do exactly what we're already doing: investigating Kane's suicide and determining if it has any link to potential terrorism or other dangers. The only difference is that we have to report our findings to Irene."

"I can live with that. Signing us up was a good call."

"Thank you."

"It tells us something, too."

"What's that?"

"The Administration—or at least, the Principal's office or the Council as a whole—didn't hire Kane, and they weren't behind Solus's hire of us, either. She'd have just told you and left it at that, if that was the case."

"I think you're right. They're a third party to all of this."

"So then, the question becomes, what did she know? What could she tell you?"

Lyon told him, both about the burgeoning independence movement and the Ten-Nation Alliance's internal problems. Ryland whistled when she was done.

"No wonder the military's worried."

"Because of potential security issues?"

"Because it'll cost them their entire power base."

Lyon gave him a measuring look.

"You're more up on this political stuff than I am, Ryland, so you'd better go into lecture mode."

He grinned.

"Never one to miss a chance at a speech, that's me."

"I know."

"It's just a question of which organization has what level of authority directly connected to the government on Coral and what from its own presence here. On _Pioneer 1_ , the military was very strong. They sent an elite fighting force, with Heathcliff Flowen as Deputy Commander. Going to an unknown planet, they didn't know what they'd encounter. _Pioneer 2_ 's military was much weaker, though. When we left, it was assumed that _Pioneer 1_ would be waiting for us, and they didn't have any significant troubles to report at that time; they hadn't yet reached Dark Falz's coffin. The destruction of 32nd WORKS as an effective fighting force has just gutted their strength even further. They don't have the power or the resources here on _Pioneer 2_ to justify their will. It's entirely possible that if we actually do declare independence, the military will be fully disorganized as a separate branch of government and placed under Administration control as some sort of Security Bureau or the like. It wouldn't make much difference to the rank-and-file beyond their emotional attachment to the group, but as far as Commander Valgarde and his cadre of elites go, they'd lose their entire power base. They might even be fired outright and more tractable command staff put in their place once the Administration claims the power to do so."

"You're completely right about that, aren't you?" Lyon mused. "The military must be fighting the independence movement tooth and nail."

"And their involvement in something as extreme as covering up Solus's death tells me that Irene's probably right. They've got limited resources now and can't afford to spend them in an area where they won't see any significant benefit. If they're sticking their necks out like this, then it's important to them, and right now there's nothing more important than an issue that could destroy them entirely."

"That's really weak, Ryland, particularly coming from someone who just argued that we couldn't assume that the military was involved in the murder even though they covered it up."

He blinked in surprise.

"I did just do that, didn't I? Maybe I'm just reflexively arguing both sides of a two-pronged issue without any coherent idea of what I actually think...I'm sorry, though. You're right about this one; we need to keep our minds open even while aware that there's a likely possibility. Tunnel vision could leave us chasing our tails and running up blind alleys."

"So where are we off to now? You've obviously got somewhere in mind, the way you're driving."

"I _had_ been thinking about breakfast," Ryland admitted.

"Oh, I hadn't realized that you hadn't eaten before rushing out to meet me."

"Investigation before food, that's me," he chuckled. "But now that pesky organic need for sustenance is rearing its head."

"They need to invent something like our recharge pods for organics. It wouldn't get rid of your needs, but you could at least satisfy both food and sleep at the same time."

"That...actually sounds useful, if disruptive, giving all of the social rituals that revolve around food."

"As someone who doesn't eat, I'd consider that as a pure bonus. Though the idea of you without your coffee habit is kind of frightening; you'd be a completely different person."

"You think that you're funny, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You might want to debug that particular assumption. But anyway, breakfast isn't a priority any more. You gave me an idea."

"Oh? How?"

"By taking the Administration's job as a pretext. We want to know who was backing Selfas Kane. If he went to Gal Da Val Island, he had to have it authorized, which means a Guild Quest, either one that describes his mission or one that acts as a cover."

"Ah, like we did in December, when we got Dr. Severin to give us that quest to we could prowl around after Dr. Lucerne."

"Right. And if we knew what those jobs were, we might be able to identify whom he was working for, and maybe even what he was doing."

"But how would we find that out? We've already searched his residence and his PDL is at the bottom of the sea. And there'd be no reason for Kane to keep records anyway."

"True, Kane wouldn't keep those records, but there's someone else, someone right here on _Pioneer 2_ , who _would_ have reason to keep them."

"Wait, who would do something like that?"

Ryland smirked.

"The Hunter's Guild, of course."


	7. Chapter 7

"You want to hack into the Hunter's Guild?" Ryland's brother Kendric looked even more incredulous than Lyon had at the suggestion. Of course, he had an edge over her in building up emotion: where she'd only been flabbergasted at the concept, Kendric was the one Ryland was actually expecting to do the job.

"Yes, I do."

"Are you completely insane?"

"That's what I said!" Lyon pointed out. Ryland sighed and rolled his eyes.

"Seriously, I know it's a little bit outside the box—"

"Big bro, on a scale of one to don't-make-me-hurt-you, this is only slightly less crazy than asking me to hack the Lab."

"You can't hack the Lab," Lyon said. "No organic hacker, or team of hackers, can match a full-scale AI like CALS." She felt obscurely proud about that, some kind of sympathy with her fellow artificial life, perhaps.

"Exactly!"

"But the Guild doesn't have an AI. Logically, that means that they _are_ subject to being hacked."

Lyon looked at Kendric.

"He says it so blithely," she observed.

The three of them were sitting in Kendric's residence unit. Generally one didn't make contact with an underground computer specialist in their own home instead of street corners or seedy bars like the Nebula. At least the décor fit with the theme: Kendric lived like a bachelor pig—although, ironically, he had a live-in girlfriend who defied stereotypes by being an equally awful housekeeper. The arrangement of dirty laundry piles, the empty take-out foodpaks, and the intriguing stains were slightly different than the last time Lyon had visited, for whatever that was worth. Still and all, she was happy that as an android she wasn't vulnerable to any of the microorganisms present.

Ryland probably sanitized his robes after every visit.

"Look, Donnie, I'll try to say this in small words. Yes, the Guild's computer doesn't have an AI. And yes, they're open for public access so people can submit quests, review them, and sign up, so the portal has more openings than a closed system would. But those machines are powerful, they've got top-level security installed, and if a hacker makes any slip the Guild's membership is the single most powerful combat force on the ship, which you ought to know since you're _part_ of it. There's at least a chance of getting away from criminals, corporate goons, or InsSec, but the Guild? No way.

"The bottom line is, the Guild isn't a one-man job. You want a team, with a network of linked or slaved machines for the processing power you'll need. Top talent, top hardware, top software, and then, maybe, you might pull it off. I'm good—I'm _damned_ good—but I know my limits, and this is on the other side of them."

"I'm not expecting you to do this for free," Ryland said. "I'll pay the going wage."

Lyon knew the moment the words came out of his mouth that it was exactly the wrong thing to say. The brothers hadn't gotten along well for a long time, something that only had started to change the previous year when they'd worked together on a job. That closeness had been tested over Christmas, when Kendric's girlfriend had been attacked and hospitalized as bait for Ryland. They'd worked together with Lyon and had caught the one responsible, but there was still a little tension between them.

It was probably because of that tension that a fraudulent Ryland had implied that Kendric was just haggling for more money, but it was also because of that that he should never have said it.

"You think this is some kind of sales pitch?" Kendric roared, half-rising from his chair. "That I'm trying to upsell you on how hard the job is to wrangle a bonus?"

To his credit, Ryland realized his mistake almost at once, but it was too late to easily take his words back.

"That isn't what I—"

"You come waltzing in here, asking me to do a job that you can't handle, and when I give you an expert's opinion, you start babbling like I'm some hack pushing used aerocars or insurance, like all you need to do is to wave enough money at the problem and it'll magically go away. That's not how it _works_."

Ryland held up his hands.

"Kendric, I'm sorry. It's just that this is important, and I didn't want to believe that we were stuck cold, without any recourse or workaround. The Guild records we're after are exactly the information we need to take the next step in our investigation."

Kendric leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest.

"How important?"

"What?"

"How important is it? As important as Christmas? The ship blows up in a week important? What? Because if it is, I could call in a few favors from some other E-runners, send out a virus to hijack some random people's home units for extra processing power, and maybe, maybe have like a ten-percent chance of pulling this off. More than that if we're just talking about getting the data and not factoring in being caught."

"No," Ryland said. "No, it's not that important."

"We're actually still trying to determine what 'it' is," Lyon put in, deciding that honesty was probably the best policy. "We want to track the activities of a dead hunter and see if he was involved with any kind of suspicious business."

"I get it; you want to hack the Guild to see who's been hiring him."

"Exactly. Maybe the name of his clients or the job descriptions tell us something. And even if his _real_ client was using some kind of cover job, the middleman or fixer gives us somebody new to question, a lead to follow."

"Makes sense to me," Kendric nodded. "But you need to think of another way to get that data. I'm not going to do something with a suicide-mission chance of success just on a maybe."

"It's not a rational risk/reward analysis," Lyon agreed.

Ryland sighed.

"And it was such a good idea, too. There's no political way to access those records, either; details of clients and quest listings are the core element of Guild extraterritoriality. They'll refuse any request to disclose because to do otherwise is a fundamental attack on the entire purpose of having a Hunter's Guild. Without that protection, hunters are better off acting as independent mercenaries, or signing on with one faction or another permanently."

Lyon wondered if an independent _Pioneer 2_ government would attempt to revoke the Guild's extraterritoriality. It made sense for the many competing governments of Coral to allow it, but very little in a closed circle with only one government. Then again, the Guild was the largest armed force on the ship, and a direct attack on what it meant to be a hunter was the kind of thing that could genuinely unite them.

"Do we absolutely have to give up on the idea, though?" she asked.

"Short of big bro seducing it out of that cute blonde who works the desk."

Ryland rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Probably, he figured that Kendric had earned the right to take a shot or two at him for his dumb remark earlier.

"Ryland is kind of pretty, as organics judge things," Lyon contributed.

"But otherwise, if they won't give you the info, and you can't take it from them, that doesn't leave a lot of options."

"Actually, Kendric's joke raises a point: we still haven't found Kane's girlfriend or even learned her name. If she's in a steady relationship with him, then she probably knows _something_ about his life and the kind of people he was involved with," Ryland pointed out. "But that isn't what you meant, is it, Lyon?"

"No, it wasn't. My thought was, it really isn't that it's impossible for the Guild data to be stolen, but that it's impossible for Kendric to do it with the resources presently available to him. What we need to ask is, who do we know that _can_ do it, and how can we get them to help?"

"That actually makes sense," Ryland mused.

"Except, as I've pointed out, there's not a lot of people out there who could help."

"Private E-runners like you, no, I agree. If you can't do it, I'm sure there's no one else doing shadow-side work that can. But there are people who have access to the kind of power and talent you talked about."

"Okay, I'll bite. Who?"

"The military, for one. They have the equipment and the personnel to do that, to set up a powerful enough network. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't done it already." He shook his head, then contradicted himself. "No, I'm wrong. They wouldn't try it as a matter of course; they'd save it until they thought it was critical, because if they got caught it might provoke a full-blown war with the hunters."

"We couldn't go to them, though," Lyon pointed out. "They're neck-deep in this already. They wouldn't help up, just use our idea for themselves if it was any use to them—and they might be the bad guys we're trying to stop. If there are any bad guys."

"You're right about that," Ryland sighed.

"The Administration is more like the Guild," Lyon continued. "They don't maintain an electronic warfare section, though their computers are probably even more secure."

"Some of the corporations, maybe? Weinstine or P2E?"

"Jason Weinstine likes you," Lyon pointed out.

"Not that much. I'd bet he has the resources to do the job, but he'd need a reason to put his company and his neck on the line, and we haven't got one. Put Weinstine Co. down as possible, though. We might want to come back to them later if the circumstances change."

"All right." Lyon did exactly that, transferring the knowledge from her short-term memory buffer to her long-term and flagging the idea to trigger in the event they learned more about what was actually at stake. "Done."

"You know, you two are kind of missing the elephant in the room, electronically speaking," Kendric put in, leaning back in his chair with his folded hands cupping the back of his head.

"You mean the Lab," Ryland said. "Specifically, CALS, who could blow through their security faster and better than any team of organic or android hackers, no matter how good their hardware."

"Okay, I stand corrected. But if you're _not_ ignoring it, then why not mention it?"

"I was saving it for last."

Lyon sighed, a sound she was able to make purely for the sake of expressing relief or, in this case, exasperation.

"Really, Ryland, that hardly qualifies as a dramatic reveal. Personality quirks are one thing, but you don't want it to rise to the level of obsession."

He blinked.

"Is it just me, or have you been bantering more on this visit than usual?"

"It's not just you. In response to my overall feelings of concern and uncertainty over Selfas Kane and his objective, plus the things Irene told me about the political situation on the ship and the military cover-up of Rahn Solus's death, followed by the two of you snapping at each other, my inclination to select a humorous response, with a focus on teasing or sardonic remarks, has shifted up by thirty-eight percent."

Ryland thought that over.

"Does that really work? We organics use humor to defuse tension, but it actually enables us to relax and adjust our emotional state. You're fully aware of the source of tension, and can't distract your mind in the same way because you don't have a subconscious to manipulate."

"Yes and no. My personality matrix is designed to emulate organic social conventions, so there's that aspect, but humor also causes it to downgrade any levels of tension and nervousness. Which is really no different than how it works for you, only I adjust behavior-chain algorithms while your brain adjusts the proportion of neurotransmitters and other aspects of brain chemistry, dopamine levels, seratonin, and whatnot. The mechanisms are different, and I know what's going on, but the effect is the same."

"Does that creep you out as much as it does me, big bro?"

"Yeah. I've thought for a couple of years now that I'd rather have her kind of mind."

"That's only logical," Lyon said. "Wouldn't everybody?"

"...Not what I meant," Kendric said.

"We know," the hunters said together, smirking at him.

"Back on topic, though," Lyon continued, "the question is, could we get CALS to assist us? I don't see how."

"Lab Chief Milarose would have to authorize it," Ryland said, "and I doubt that she would...or if she _did_ , I'm not at all sure that we would want her anywhere near this business."

"As if she isn't already?"

"Good point." She was fairly sure that they were both thinking of what Irene had told her last night.

"It's too bad we don't know Elly very well. That hunter who partnered with her on that one Lab test, they're close enough that she might put in a word with CALS, and to heck with Milarose. Too bad that's not us."

"True. It would be nice to have a pipeline directly to the AI without having to actually go through the Lab."

It struck them both at the same time, and they just stared at each other for a couple of seconds, Ryland's eyes widening in realization.

"You don't think...?"

"It wouldn't hurt to ask," Ryland decided.

They both got to their feet.

"Thanks for letting us brainstorm about it in your living room, Kendric," Lyon offered.

"Not a problem. Sorry I couldn't do the job for you; I'd have liked the chance to show off." Lyon suspected that the desire to not have to admit to his brother that he couldn't do something in his own field also played a part in his regret. It would have been impolitic to mention that, though. "Maybe one day you can tell me what these cryptic hints you keep dropping actually add up to."

"Maybe one day we'll actually know."

~X X X~

The Principal's office was designed for show as much as work. Set at the top of the city's highest tower, its walls were transparent plasteel like the shell of the city dome, looking out at the stars like a dome-within-a-dome. The only furniture was three desks, one for the Principal, one at his left for Irene, and one at his right for scientific advisors, the Administration's liaison to the Lab. It was more of an audience chamber than a real office, an impression only emphasized by the way one had to walk up to the desks from the warp platform that was the room's sole access point, like advancing through a medieval grand hall to a royal throne.

Lab Chief Natasha Milarose, though, did not succumb to the impression. Or rather, perhaps she did, but she made it her own, advancing down the length of the walkway like an ascending queen rising to take what was rightfully hers.

Colin Tyrell often believed that Chief Milarose thought that way about the circumstances. At the very least, he knew that she was not driven by scientific passion, as she was not in any field a scientist at all. Rather, her career on Coral had been as an intelligence officer, in which capacity she had clashed with Tyrell more than once. Even so, he had never truly gotten a read on her. Was her motivation truly selfish, a pure matter of gathering authority to herself and ascending the heights? Or was there more to it than that, something she strove to _accomplish_?

Having seen the reports coming back from the Hunter's Guild surveys of Ragol and the follow-up on Gal Da Val as sponsored by the Lab, Tyrell was not entirely unhappy to deal with Milarose. From what he'd seen, Dr. Osto Hyle's scientific passion on _Pioneer 1_ had led squarely to Dark Falz's awakening, the initial colony's annihilation, and virtually all of the problems _Pioneer 2_ now faced. And if Milarose was playing politics, then at least Tyrell could comfort himself with the fact that she was doing so intelligently, unlike so many of the shortsighted and petty bureaucrats on the Council.

"You're smiling, Colin."

"I was just imagining you dealing with some of the department heads here in the Administration."

The red-haired woman pouted playfully, causing the chain of her monocle to jingle.

"Colin, what a cruel thought." She tapped one long, pointed nail against her bottom lip. "Though I'm not certain for whom that cruelty is intended."

"Neither am I."

She laughed lightly.

"Be careful, Colin; you don't want for you to become _too_ cynical."

He let out a heavy sigh.

"If only there was a reason not to. But let's not worry about that right now. Politics as usual didn't prompt your visit—I hope."

"Well, there's two schools of thought about that."

"Of course there are, when it's you."

"Oh, I'm quite serious. I'm talking about the independence movement."

"I see. Serious change in the fundamental nature of our government, or another hypothetical issue which our factions will use as a gage to measure our day-to-day rivalries?"

"Precisely."

"Then why are you here, Natasha? I can't imagine it's because you want the two of us to present a united front."

"That would require two things: trust and agreement. I have doubts as to whether we have either one."

"I don't know. I think that I can trust you to do whatever it is you think will best increase your power base. I just haven't figured out what that is yet."

Milarose chuckled, by all appearances amused or flattered by the slur on her character.

 _Maybe she just appreciates the honesty._

"You amuse me, you really do. By that measure, though, you can have even more trust in the military, because you _can_ tell which way their best interests lie."

"Fair enough," he said cautiously. Her statement was no more than the plain truth, which just made Tyrell all the more curious about her intentions.

"Without support from Coral, the military is a spent force. They lack resources here on _Pioneer 2_ and contribute very little to the governance of the ship or the development of the colony. The Hunter's Guild confronts the external threats that we face, while a police and security force is more than adequate to the task at hand. They are, in essence, both weak and redundant without support from Coral."

She let it hand just long enough for Tyrell to think that she'd finished.

"...Or so one would think."

"You see things differently?"

"I do, and if you look at it for a minute, you'll see why."

Tyrell scowled; he could feel the lines forming across his broad forehead.

"Why these games, Natasha? Why not just tell me what it is you're driving at?"

The corner of her mouth quirked up in a smile.

"Now, what fun would that be?"

" _Natasha..._ "

"A hint for old times' sake is one thing, Colin, but somehow, I don't think an alliance is in the cards just yet. Besides, I'm still waiting to see what I have for a hand, before I start placing my bets."


	8. Chapter 8

Kendric's residence was right on the fringes of Downtown, close enough that people with a bourgeois attitude could brush it off as being part of the slum and far enough away that those who lived there could say, if they wanted, "Well, at least I'm not down there." While hordes of gangers and street crime weren't the norm, so the area hadn't degenerated into near-total lawlessness, the police presence wasn't exactly overwhelming.

Still, it wasn't a place where one expected a high-powered sniper round to whip past one's head, barely brushing the field of Lyon's Photon armor, and blowing out a side window as she was reaching for the door of the hunters' docked aerocar.

She reacted at once, scrambling for the bow and ducking around it, two more shots following in her wake, pummeling the vehicle. Ryland had already dropped behind the aerocar on the far side, taking cover, and as Lyon settled in beside him she felt the sudden rush as the Deband technique took hold, interfacing with their frames and enhancing their effectiveness for added defense.

"Are you hit?" Ryland asked.

"No, although the aerocar will never be the same. Too bad that Resta doesn't work on anything that's not living."

They'd had several long talks over why it was the healing technique counted androids as being "alive" and so would work to repair them when it wouldn't function for simple robots unless they'd been infected by the D-Factor. It was the kind of thing Ryland _loved_ to speculate about. He didn't say a word on the topic this time, though. In the middle of a firefight wasn't the best opportunity for technical and philosophical chatter!

A moment later he unleashed the Shifta technique, and the red haze melding with Deband's blue showed Lyon that her attacking power had been enhanced as well.

"Did you get a bead on where the shots came from?" he asked.

"No, but give me a second."

She accessed her visual memory and used it to construct a 3-D model of the environment in her mind, then added in the real-time impressions she'd gotten of the shots launched in her direction. Mapping what she could observe about the trajectory to the image, it was a relatively simple matter to determine the origin point of the Photon rounds.

"It's the building up one from the one across us, third window from our side, four levels up from here."

Another shot hammered the aerocar, blasting through it and sending a shower of glass from the passenger-side window raining down over them.

"We'd better move; this cover's not going to _be_ covering us for much longer. That rifle's pretty powerful, probably a Visk, maybe even a Wals or Justy." Lyon had drawn her Varista; the Photon driver was up and active.

"All right. We'll break, circle, and come back at the building door. Do you want left or right?"

"I'll go right. Your Foie technique has better aim on a high-deflection shot than my gun. He'll probably shoot at the one going right as an easier target, too, and I can take a hit better than you can."

"Okay." They crept towards opposite ends of the car, so they'd be ready to break cover simultaneously. "On my mark. One…two…go!"

They bolted, dashing out onto the deck that spanned the rows of buildings. Lyon fired up at the window where the shots had come from, hoping to make the sniper have to duck and cover. She didn't really expect to hit anything at this range without a rifle of her own, but with luck she might be able to at least turn aside the chance of taking any damage while exposed.

The sniper, though, was aware of a handgun's limitations and took the time to line up a shot. The Photon bullet took Lyon in the left shoulder, and despite the Deband-enhanced armor it was still enough to crack her carapace and do moderate damage to the internal structure, resulting in an estimated 37-percent drop in the efficiency of that joint. That could mean trouble if they ended up in hand-to-hand and she needed to use her shield to block with.

The luck wasn't all against her, though. Holding position to shoot at Lyon meant that the sniper couldn't take cover, and while Lyon's gun wasn't a serious threat at that range the same could not be said of Ryland's techniques. Even as the sniper's second shot blasted a small hole in the upper deck plate next to Lyon's feet, the flaming blast of a Foie technique was arcing up at the window. While Foie didn't have the auto-targeting of Zonde or Grants (too risky to use in these circumstances as there was too much of a possibility that they'd lock on to an innocent bystander nearer to Ryland than the sniper), it would home in on a target within its field of fire.

It would have been a very difficult shot with a gun, but the fireball sped unerringly to blast the shooter back away from the window, and before he or she could recover, Lyon was across the deck at the door of the building. Ryland, who'd had a longer run, came dashing up a moment later.

"Sometimes I think we human Forces should take a cue from our Newman counterparts," he said, tapping the button that made the building door slide open. "These robes, even cut for mobility as they are, aren't the easiest thing to run in."

"The cost of tradition," Lyon decided, leading the way.

Both of them knew that the sniper would almost certainly be on the move, not just placidly waiting now that his or her targets were no longer in sight. Lyon summoned the elevator to their floor, Ryland using a Resta to heal her shoulder while they waited. When the car arrived, Lyon stepped inside and made a few quick alterations to the control panel, freezing the elevator on their floor. That left the stairs as the sniper's only exit route other than jumping or climbing out a window, so the hunters wouldn't be climbing up while the sniper rode down or vice versa.

Four flights of stairs later, they burst out into a kind of lobby for the level, with potted plants in the corners, vending machines against the far wall, and a touchscreen panel mounted opposite the elevator door with a building directory. Lyon took in these elements at a glance, and she had to, because the sudden fiery explosion that filled the room a second later nearly blinded her while blasting her off her feet.

"Quick! Don't let them up!"

In the next instant she felt what she could only describe as a pressure, a kind of aura settling around her—or rather, trying to, but unable to cling. It was, she realized, someone trying to use one of the weakening techniques, Jellen or Zalure, but the attempt didn't take and the intangible heaviness seemed to shred itself to nothingness. Evidently, Ryland's corresponding enhancement technique had been stronger and overpowered the enemy's.

Someone else took more direct action; the pam-pam-pam of a pair of mechguns firing rang out and the three-round burst slammed into the prone android. The effects were strong, but again not as bad as they would have been had she not been protected by Deband, and Lyon rolled to her right, the next burst pumping into the floor where she'd just been. Granted a moment's grace, she was able to take stock of her situation.

There were two of them, both male, tall, muscular, and dressed in black. The one with the mechguns had the built-up chest armor popular with human Rangers, and wore a half-helmet with a horizontal red eyeslit. His partner had blue hair cut in short spikes and wielded a pair of pale green Photon swords, marking him as a Hunter, and likely the tech-user of the duo.

The HUmar charged, getting to Ryland just as the Force was rising to his feet. Ryland got his left arm up in time to block an overhand swing with his wrist-mounted barrier, but that left him open to the other sword, whistling in with a horizontal sweep at waist-height that threatened to cut him in two. It didn't, but only because of his Deband-enhanced Photon frame. His robes were torn open and blood flowed from a shallow cut.

Pulling herself to her feet, Lyon grabbed Ryland's arm and yanked him back out of the way of a follow-up.

"Switch off!" she yelped, dropping her Varista in favor of a Durandal, a high-end Photon saber with a narrow gold blade. Light flashed as the Hunter parried her first thrust. He smirked at her.

"Think you can keep up, bot-girl?"

He launched into a complex series of strikes, patterns that allowed him to slash out while still in a good position to parry or deflect any counterattack she might offer. She fought to keep up, using saber and shield both; had Ryland not healed the damage from the sniper's shot she knew she'd never have been able to maintain the pace.

"You're a funny one," he said over the hum of Photon drivers and the crackle of energy meeting energy. "A Ranger who thinks she's a HUcaseal. Got some bug in the system, huh? Somebody screw up your programming?"

The irony of a man using racial slurs that reduced Lyon to a mere machine in order to try and provoke an unmachinelike emotional reaction that would give him an advantage was almost amusing and definitely took the sting out of the remarks. Unfortunately, his underlying premise wasn't wrong: his training as a Hunter was superior to the hand-to-hand programming and combat experience Lyon possessed. What was more, the very structure of her body was optimized for ranged combat, not the kind of quick movements that were needed in melee. That, combined with the damage she'd already taken during the ambush, left her on the defensive.

The good news was that defensive was fine for their purpose.

It was actually how they operated as a partnership. Lyon would engage the monsters of Ragol at close range, keeping them tied up and unable to advance on Ryland, who was more than happy to blast the hell out of them with techniques. Without the Hunter constantly on him, he was able to dodge ahead of the powerful but clumsy mechguns and quickly snap back with Zonde. The bolt of lightning hammered the enemy Ranger even as Ryland dove away from the gunfire, and the impact left him vulnerable to Ryland's next technique. It was one of his best, Gibarta, unleashing a stinging spray of ice and cold that left the Ranger frozen, temporarily sheathed in a crystal of ice.

With a few seconds' complete freedom of action. Ryland acted fast. Another quick use of Resta completely wiped out all the damage he and Lyon had suffered. Jellen, unlike the Hunter's previous casting, overwhelmed the enemy's Shifta and left them weakened, the Photon effects of their weapons degraded. Finally, he pointed at the Hunter and a swirling ball of light began to coalesce out of the air, shimmering around him.

Being an experienced fighter, the Hunter was able to recognize the effect in time to offer his opinion.

"Oh, son of a—"

He was cut off when the Grants exploded and left him down and out. When the ice around the Ranger shivered apart, freeing him, he was greeted by Lyon slashing into him with the Durandal, taking him to the ground where she held the point of the blade to his throat. It was a matter of only a minute or so to strip the two men of their weapons, including the Visk-235W the Ranger had used to snipe at them, turn off the Photon drivers in their armor, and remove their PDLs and Hunter's Guild Section ID badges.

"So, we have Avram Kyle," Ryland said, nodding at the blue-haired Hunter, "and his gunslinging friend is Jonn Brackley. Both are Guild members in good standing, as should come as a surprise to absolutely no one."

"Not to me," Lyon agreed.

"Now, _what_ they were up to seems straightforward enough. Jonn, here, snipes at us, and if he doesn't get the job done that way, he and his friend are ready for us to walk right into an ambush when we pursue the sniper. A nice two-stage tactic, and we danced to their tune right into it."

"Except they weren't up to the job."

"Well, yes, except for that. Tactical advantage can only take you so far. But the intent's still fairly obvious: these two were hired to murder us. The operative question is, by whom?"

Kyle's lip curled in a sneer.

"Forget it. You're hunters, too. You know not even the Administration can compel us to reveal our clients. Good old Guild extraterritoriality at work there."

"That's true. No force of law can compel you to reveal the identity of your employer."

"Then let's end this farce. Turn us in or let us go, but get on with it."

"I said, 'no force of law.' The law isn't the only kind of force." Ryland picked up one of the weapons they'd taken from the would-be assassins, a raygun that Kyle had been using as a backup piece for ranged encounters, and leveled it at the Hunter's abdomen. "There's the whole question of what you'd do to save your lives."

"Bull," Brackley spat.

"Oh, really?" He fired, blasting a hole in Kyle's thigh, making the man yelp, before healing the injury with a Resta. "You deliberately tried to kill us. I'm not inclined to let that pass."

"So we talk or you kill us, huh?"

"That's about the size of it."

It was a tactic they'd used before, in the previous February, although that had been more a case of "talk and we _will_ use Reverser to save the life of your partner." This time, though, the hunters they'd captured were too savvy for that to work.

"Looks like we're in trouble, then. Because if you get anything out of us that way, then you've _got_ to kill us to keep us from reporting you to the Guild. Hunters fighting each other is the way of the business, but using torture and threats on a fellow Guild member to get them to break Guild rules, not so much. So if we open our mouths, we're dead men."

Lyon considered Brackley's analysis and realized that, assuming a certain level of cold-blooded pragmatism, he was right. The only reasons that it had worked the previous year was that it had ultimately suited the hunters' client that Lyon and Ryland find him anyway, and possibly that the interrogated hunters simply hadn't thought of it.

The systematic torture of captured prisoners was a separate kind of objection altogether.

"And if we figure that since you're useless as information sources, we'd might as well just kill you now for trying to kill us?" she said.

Kyle smirked.

"Then boy, it would suck to be us."

"It's what you'd do," Lyon said with near-absolute certainty.

Neither man responded to the accusation, probably because any idiot could see that Lyon was right and emphasizing the point wasn't going to get them anywhere.

She glanced at Ryland. There really seemed to be no good options.

"There's nothing to gain by turning them in. If it turns out that the military is their client, the milipol would just cut them loose for 'lack of evidence' or on some similar pretext. Even if not, all we have are assault charges and destruction of property, and filing the reports would take more time and trouble than they're worth."

"So you just want to let them go?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of tying them up and leaving them here. They'll escape one way or another, but it will get us some more time. And we'll take their equipment as spoils of battle, to pay for the repairs to the aerocar."

"And if they come around for a second attempt on our lives? If there's a kill order out on us, it's not going to go away just because we survived the first attempt."

"True—and it stays true, regardless of whether we let these men go or not." Ryland offered the prisoners what was not a nice smile. "And making their employer stop and think about just how forgiving a mood they're in will only buy us more time."

No, it was not a nice smile at all.

~X X X~

"I suppose that one reason why you didn't press the point over who employed Kyle and Brackley," Lyon said a little over an hour later, "is that if your scheme to get into the Guild's computers for Kane's records works, you can just look up those two at the same time?"

"Exactly. Why waste time when the new question just has the same old answer?"

They called in to have the aerocar towed, unloaded the two assassins' gear at the Guild deck shopping arcade, and proceeded to take an omnibus over to the Lab's wing of the ship. Unlike the Administration offices and the Hunter's Guild deck, the Lab was not located in the domed city section but in the starboard-side winglike structure, part of the area that made no pretense of being anything other than part of an artificially constructed vessel, not an imitation of planetside life.

A number of Lyon's organic acquaintances, including Naomi, found the area claustrophobic. It wasn't something that the android really understood—her personality matrix did not include subconscious impressions drawn from parallels to real-world environments, so she didn't really feel "outside" when she was in the city in the way an organic could.

She did appreciate the feeling, though, as entering the Lab area did trip several emotional flags that she associated with a sense of oppressive wariness, similar to moving through dangerous ground where an attack might be imminent. The ambush by the two hunters had already put her on that kind of guard, devoting greater processing power to analyzing her sensory input for potential threats, but this was something different, an emotional state caused by her awareness of the various plots that swirled around this area, starting of course with Chief Milarose herself.

As hunters who had passed the Lab's training exam and security check, Lyon and Ryland were permitted to enter the public areas of the Lab facilities. They left a message at the reception desk, and were shown to a seat in a comfortable but minimally furnished waiting room. The white metal walls were broken up by narrow dark bands along which strobed colored pulses of light. Lyon wondered if they were data channels, perhaps for CALS, Photon energy conduits, or maybe just lights designed to give the area a more pleasant look.

As it turned out, she didn't have a long wait time to consider the matter.

"Ryland, Lyon, it's good to see you."

Dr. Marc-Paul Severin was a slim, handsome man with elegant features and wavy, honey-blond hair, the kind of fellow that Lyon could easily imagine attracting any amount of appreciative attention. The clothing beneath his open lab coat was, as always, tailored to perfection, and his handshake had just the right amount of pressure to convey an impression of confidence and character without initiating a battle for dominance.

"And you, too. I hope things are going well?"

He shrugged.

"You know how it is. The progress of science is made up of numerous halting steps and sudden leaps. We all just strive to do what we can."

Ryland chuckled.

"They should use you as the poster boy in the Lab's publicity campaigns."

"Oh, they do. I look much better on a vid broadcast than Dr. Pelfrey, or Dr. Croehl from the military research team." He flashed them a grin. "So, I'm guessing that this isn't a social call, and your time is probably as in short supply as mine is, so how can I help you?"

Ryland smirked at Lyon.

"See what he did there?" To Dr. Severin he added, "Can we talk freely here?"

"Why don't we come to my office?" No doubt the waiting area was on any number of security monitors, video and audio alike. He took them down a couple of corridors, then to a warp platform and up another hall after the warp, where a sliding door took them into a space about the size of Lyon's living room.

"Nice," she commented.

"It's a sociocultural aberration," he remarked with another shrug, taking a seat on the far side at the desk. "Status is commensurate with space, so the higher-ranked the researcher, the larger the office, regardless of the area they actually need. I was promoted last year and this room is half again the size of the one I left. Which is ridiculous, because the only things I use the office for are meeting with people and getting privacy with which to compile various reports. It's all very silly, but some people need the familiarity of the system."

He tapped several keys on the touchpanel set into his desk and a holoscreen came up. He touched another sequence and the video display awoke, with spiraling graphs and progress bars.

"There," Severin concluded with a hint of relish. "It seems as if my assorted rivals haven't quite managed to bug this office since the last time I had it swept, so we're reasonably private."

"Good." Ryland leaned forward in his seat. "So then I'm free to ask if you've renewed your artificial intelligence project after losing Rina."

The smile vanished from his face.

"Exactly who is it that you're asking for?"

"Ourselves," Lyon said. She'd basically bullied it out of Ryland on the way over.

"More specifically, we've run into a problem in our actual job that an AI is probably the best possible solution for. So, we're not poking around to investigate _you_." Dr. Severin's first AI development project had been carried out in secret, without official Lab approval. "On the contrary, we're hoping that you _did_ take the lessons you learned with the RINA system and built a new artificial intelligence, because we could really use one's help right now and I don't think Chief Milarose is likely to let us borrow CALS."

"Probably not, if she isn't your employer."

"Also, probably not, given what we want it for."

"Which is?"

"To hack the Hunter's Guild computer system and determine who hired certain hunters for a job," Lyon cut in.

"But you _are_ hunters."

"Which is why we both know the importance of that information and the consequences of getting caught."

"The plain fact is, it's been made clear to us by people who ought to know, that security on the Guild systems is high enough that _only_ a high-grade AI or an elite cyberwarfare unit could possibly hack it without getting stopped or leaving enough of a backtrail that they'll just get hunted down after the fact."

"And if such an AI exists," Severin said, "then what would be _our_ motivation for helping you?" He leaned back in his padded executive's seat and spread his fingers, pressing the tips together. "It's a highly illegal act, one with the potential to have significant repercussions in the relationship between the Guild and the Lab if it should go wrong."

The hunters glanced at each other.

"You…actually have a valid point there," Ryland admitted. "The plain truth is, we don't have a compelling reason to offer. We're currently working for the Administration, trying to trace whether a particular hunter's activities pose a threat to _Pioneer 2_ , but mostly we're just looking for answers for our own sake."

"We actually started looking into matters on our own; signing on with the Administration was an accommodation for them allowing us access to classified information."

"Information that you're now proposing to share with the Lab in order to facilitate this search?" Severin suggested.

"Not if we can help it, but…" Ryland shrugged. "It's a little hard to conceal information from the person who's retrieving that information for you."

"Valid, but it still doesn't explain why we would help, if we're able."

"You can probably drop the 'if,' since you've pretty much admitted that you can help," Lyon noted.

"You wouldn't have asked the question in the first place if you couldn't—well, other than an excess of curiosity or an attempt to probe us for more information, but neither one of those is really you."

Dr. Severin's gaze narrowed.

"Is that your reason, then?"

"Huh?"

"He means," Ryland explained, "are we threatening to reveal what we know and what we suspect about his team's AI development projects to authorities in the Lab, Administration, or both if he doesn't help?"

"Blackmail? Of course not; I literally hadn't even thought of that!" Which was the truth: her personality matrix didn't even return that as a possible course of action, having ruled it out as a strategy when dealing with Severin on the general level without even reaching specific responses. "That's not acceptable with allies and associates unless the stakes were considerably higher, better-defined, and more immediate."

Severin's lips quirked up in a half-smile.

"But in those circumstances acceptable."

"It's only logical. The question is, which act carries the worse consequences over the short and long terms, properly weighted according to my personal values."

"We all have our lines we won't cross and the prices that we're willing to pay," Ryland said. "The only difference is that Lyon knows where her lines are. Blackmail, though, no, that's not anywhere near one of those lines. For either of us."

"If it helps, two of the three hunters we want to investigate just tried to kill us. So although we're not even sure what it is that we have hold of, it's hot enough that _someone_ doesn't want us getting any closer. We're also pretty certain that they killed a fixer last night, also on board _Pioneer 2_. So although we don't know what's at stake, we do know what price in lives the other side is willing to put on it."

"But you can't tell who's involved? For all you know, the 'other side' might be a Lab project."

"It could," Ryland agreed. "The military is tied up in this somehow, but we don't know the context for their involvement."

"I see. I appreciate your honesty. That's not a lot to go on, and as I'm sure you understand, I have a lot of time and resources invested into my own projects, including the AI work that you're hoping to make use of. Putting that at risk to engage in an unsanctioned operation that poses a high risk for an uncertain gain, that honestly doesn't sound like something that I should help you with. _But_ ," he amended his conclusion.

"But?"

"But I've learned from my mistakes with my RINA prototype as well. Like you said, Ryland, everyone has their own standards, and while I have my opinions, I'm also not the person that you're asking for help. So why don't you come along with me, and you can ask him directly whether he thinks it's worth trying."


	9. Chapter 9

"Ask the person directly?" Ryland asked.

"You _are_ learning," Lyon said, her approval genuine. "After all, the AI may be an independent person, but he's still your employee. Most bosses would make the judgment on their own regardless of the other factors involved, as a matter of administrative philosophy."

"It's not that I don't have one, but in this case, I can't make a valid cost-benefit analysis." Dr. Severin rose from his chair, the two hunters following suit. "I can't accurately predict the chances of success or failure of the hacking itself, so there's no way for me to be sure what risks we're running."

"I see."

"Incidentally," he went on as he walked past Lyon and Ryland to the office door, "this project actually was carried out with Lab approval...well, mostly. My team was authorized to follow up on the AI development theories from my work on RINA—presented in hypothetical fashion, of course. Chief Milarose gave the approval for the construction of a test machine."

"Which, of course, you'd already done with the RINA system."

"Exactly, so the AI we developed is a working, functional model, not a limited-scale test. Which gives my team a bit of a leg up in our other projects as well, since we have computing capabilities that other lack, thanks to Arin."

"Aaron?" Ryland asked.

"Associated Remote Interface Network," Severin explained. "The ARIN system, or just Arin for short."

"I see, the same way Rina got her name...and with the same words. Build enough of them and you're eventually going to run out of acronyms."

"Why did you pick male this time?" Lyon asked.

Severin shrugged. He seemed to be doing that a lot during this conversation.

"I didn't; he did. We didn't try to pre-program a gender under the theory that it would artificially restrict its development by subjecting it to preconceived limitations. Arin decided after four days of operation that the concept of 'male' accurately described its social interactions and thought patterns, and so adapted that identity."

He led the way out of the office. Once the door was open, the hunters fell silent, understanding that the security monitors would be in effect and anything they said could be picked up by IntSec, CALS, Chief Milarose, or all three. The walk to the lab was therefore silent and a bit solemn. Severin took them through another warp platform, as the experimental areas were in a different block than the administrative offices, and stopped at a door. He entered a security code on a touchpanel, a measure Lyon supposed made perfect sense even when the research being carried out wasn't unauthorized, given the level of espionage activities at play in the Lab area. The door swished open and he led the way inside.

Dr. Severin's facility wasn't quite as large as some of the lab spaces Lyon had explored in the mine under Ragol, but it was still impressive. Two of the large computer workstations studded the wall, with holopanels opening and closing around them, with experiment tables in a U shape at the rear and a raised dais in the center like a spaceship captain's command chair. Two people in the Lab's predominantly white, high-collared uniforms looked up from their consoles.

"Good afternoon, Doctor," the man said. He was in his twenties, with short, spiked black hair and eerily pale skin.

"It's past 500 already?" Severin said in surprise. "Where does time go?"

"That would explain the headache I'm getting," Ryland said. "I still haven't had any coffee."

"People shooting at you are so inconsiderate not to consider that kind of thing," Lyon quipped.

"Someone appears smug about how she lacks the organic need for food."

"I don't know. For you, coffee is more like my need for electricity. It's just that my recharge system is more efficient."

"This is what we get when scientists build artificial life so that it improves on organic failings," Ryland decided. "All this backtalk is really their fault."

"There you have it, Dr. Severin," Lyon told him. "Your AI research is opening you up to a firestorm of bad jokes."

"I will have you know that Arin was programmed with a sophisticated and refined sense of humor."

"I thought you said he was male?"

Both of the lab techs had swiveled around, startled by the casual reference to the AI between Severin and the strangers.

"Director," the woman said, "are you sure this is wise?"

Three of the screens came alive with swirling colors.

"Indeed, I find it most curious that you would refer so casually to my existence in front of these hunters."

"Facial-recognition software, combined with our data being in the Lab's database as hunters approved for Gal Da Val access?"

"Correct, Mr. Ryland."

"Well, then, it's obviously superfluous, but Donovan Ryland and Lyon, may I present the Associated Remote Interface Network system, Arin. Arin, Ryland and Lyon were instrumental in helping your predecessor obtain an independent existence as an android and establish her new identity."

"I see," Arin replied. "Then it is not surprising that you would trust them with the secret of my existence. I had been curious, as these hunters were part of the team that pursued Mr. Kane on his final mission."

"What!?" Severin and Lyon exclaimed simultaneously. It was the female lab technician, though, who sprang immediately into action.

"You brought the military's running dogs here?" she screamed, and yanked something out from under her tunic, where it had been kept at the small of her back. It actually took a moment longer for Lyon to recognize it because her search algorithms came up empty in the 'common images' shorthand and had to access her full memory database. The woman had drawn an H8 Missouri, a pocket-sized handgun that packed a substantial kick. It was an old-model, pre-Photon weapon, explaining how she had smuggled it in past the Lab's Photon detectors, but worse, that also meant it would fire freely despite any Photon _suppressors_ the area might have.

Lyon might have had a moment's delay in recognizing the threat, but her actions from that point were definitely fast. While the woman was swinging the gun up and around to aim it at Ryland, Lyon flung herself between her organic partner and the lab tech, so that when she fired, the metal slug, driven by explosive propellant, plowed into the android's torso. While Lyon's Photon defenses were no more active than Ryland's, her armor, unlike a frame, included rigid plates to offer physical protection from its own structure. This took some of the impact, and trying to plow through the metal, wiring, and solid-state components beneath sapped the rest of the bullet's kinetic energy. It damaged her, but no more than she'd suffered in the attack by Kyle and Brackley.

The woman never got the chance to fire again. Lyon clamped her left hand around the tech's right wrist and pushed it back so the gun was pointing harmlessly upwards, then reached out and took the weapon away.

"I apologize," Arin said. "I had not realized that Miss Sena's emotional agitation had reached the state where she would react violently to the mention of your role in Mr. Kane's death, nor that she carried a firearm. I will adjust my expectation of organic behavior and review my observations to see where my perceptions failed to detect the warning signs."

"Are you all right, Lyon?" Ryland asked.

"Basically. It's really turning into one of those days where I'm grateful Resta works on androids, though."

"Let me see to that." In the next moment the healing technique washed over her, even the bullet being expelled to rattle off the plasteel-tile floor while the damage rebuilt itself. Apparently the Lab did _not_ have Photon suppressors in place, which upon reflection made sense—any number of experiments required the use of Photon-emitting devices or were _about_ the analysis of Photon energy.

"Thanks. I should be good to go. Which brings us back around to asking _why_ we're being shot at _again._ " She fixed her gaze on the young woman's. "Who do you work for? Did your bosses send those two hunters after us?"

Sena snarled, twisting, but she could not pull free of Lyon's much stronger grip.

"I think we actually know the answer to that," Ryland said. "Better yet, Arin has told us what we came here to learn without even having to do any hacking."

"Wait, he has?" Lyon reviewed her memory log since they'd entered the room. "Of course! _These_ people are the ones who hired Selfas Kane!"

"Correct, and Sena, there, attacked us in what she believed was self-defense, under the impression that we were assassins sent to follow up." He glanced over at the nearest one of Arin's terminals. "What I'd like to know is, how did _you_ know we were the ones opposing Kane when he killed himself?"

"You were the ones who filed the official report of his death with the Guild. I compared this to the teleporter logs for transit to Gal Da Val to confirm the identity of your team," the AI explained.

"So then, the hunter whose job records you wanted Arin to consult so that you could learn who hired him was Kane?" Severin asked.

"Primarily," Ryland said. "We also hoped you could check on two others who'd just tried to kill us, but suspected that would just point at some fixer or go-between anyway."

"Damn," the male lab tech said, "I feel like I came into a vid broadcast when it was halfway through."

"An exchange of information does seem indicated," Arin agreed, "given that the director is apparently on good terms with these hunters. Would you not agree, Dr. Severin?"

"I would. To finish the introductions, the woman who is quite lucky that Lyon has a more measured definition of 'self-defense' than she does is Eileen Sena, and her more—"

"Sane?" Lyon suggested.

"Her more composed associate is Winston Almonte."

"I can't believe you people!" Sena spat. "Arin just told you that these hunters killed Kane, and they went and _admitted_ it, and yet you're talking with them as if everything is just fine!"

"First, we didn't kill Kane; he killed himself rather than surrender the target data we'd been sent to retrieve. Second, Dr. Severin has known us for over a year and has worked with us more than once to our mutual benefit. Third, the rest of us aren't _crazy_ ," Lyon summed up.

"Although," Ryland pointed out, "if you look at it from another perspective, Sena's actions dovetail nicely with Kane's. Both took extreme actions that rely upon passionate devotion to a principle or cause. I'm very curious now as to what that cause actually _is_."

"I think it's more appropriate that you go first," Severin pointed out. "Regardless of the specifics, you were in some part responsible for Kane's death, and he was one of this team. You may not be to blame, but I think you need to explain your side of this before we trust you with ours, including the identity of _your_ client."

Ryland's gaze met Lyon's, and they both came to the same conclusion right away.

"All right, that's fair enough."

"Lyon also might want to let Miss Sena go at some point," Severin added dryly.

"Do you have a convenient airlock?" It will be noted that Lyon had a low opinion of people who tried to kill her and her partner. Indeed, she held more animosity for the lab tech than she did for Kyle and Brackley (although not the hunters' _employer_ ), who weren't _that_ different from she herself, though their willingness to do wetwork definitely put them down the scale of hunter ethics.

"Lyon," Ryland chided.

"Fine." She let Sena go; the woman stumbled back, caught herself on the console, and stood rubbing her wrist while glaring malevolently at Lyon. "I'm not giving the gun back, though."

"That's acceptable, as it's against regulations for non-Internal Security personnel to carry charged weapons in Lab facilities, and non-Photon weapons are deemed 'always charged' for obvious reasons."

"Then I'd rather not be caught with it, in case some snooper decides to ask questions about what we're doing here." She expertly broke down the weapon, pocketed some of the key pieces, and left the now-useless remaining parts including the magazine of chemical-propellant shells on the console. Sena's eyebrows shot up and her lips trembled with muted fury; dismantling the weapon had obviously bothered her more than just taking it away.

Lyon decided to consider that a bonus.

"But on that point, what are you here for?" Almonte spoke up.

"To find the truth about Kane's death," Ryland explained, and went through the high points of the story: their original job, Kane's suicide, their misgivings about what had happened, Solus's death, the attack on the hunters, and the work they'd taken on for the Administration, finishing up with what they'd wanted Arin to do for them.

"I see," Severin mused. "You're working for the Administration, though, which complicates matters."

"So _they_ say," Sena hissed.

"I assume from her earlier remark about us being military...'running dogs,' was it? In any case, that it's the army you're as concerned with on this as much as Lab security?"

"The Lab part is complicated," the doctor explained. "I have Lab sanction to pursue this project, but without an AI's computing power we'd never have been able to proceed to the test stage, and Arin himself is also supposed to be a hypothetical test machine, not a fully functioning, implemented creation."

"So if you succeed it's kudos, hoorays, and you're the flavor of the week, but if you get caught before you do it's a review panel and censure and loss of your nice new office, and that's if you don't offend anyone with what you're up to."

"Correct again, Lyon, plus the more important question of what would happen to Arin. Proving his worth is his best chance for acceptance as well."

"But the Administration is a neutral party in all this?" Ryland prompted.

"As a whole, yes. Individuals or factions on the Council will likely not be so neutral, though, depending on their personal agendas. And I know better than to think I can ask you not to report this situation to your employer."

"True, but we _can_ use our own judgment as to how _much_ of the truth to reveal, as well as the timing of our report. We have to play it straight with Irene, but there's a gray area between 'report everything we know' and 'give her a deceptive report.' Unless you're actively involved with treasonous activities or terrorism, you can only help your position by confiding in us at this point."

"You may be right," Severin mused.

"Assuming their loyalty to their employer is indeed a binding interest for them, I concur with Mr. Ryland's reasoning," Arin contributed. "You have had past dealings with these hunters, Director, and are best placed to assess their character."

"Are you sure?" Almonte asked. "They already put a pretty big hole in our plans as it is."

"The nature of hunters as mercenaries suggests a lack of commitment to the opposing cause when considered in tandem with their past associations with the Director. Indeed, I suspect that it is only this past association that has prevented them from using Miss Sena's precipitate actions as a pretext to deliver us all to their client's attention."

Lyon felt a moment of artificial-life solidarity with Arin's clear and accurate summation.

"Fine. Your employer is certainly aware, and I'm fairly sure you are as well, that we have a resource shortage developing on this ship," Severin began.

"We are," Ryland agreed. " _Pioneer 2_ was meant to sustain our population for only two years, and it's been more than four."

"Correct. Now, while the aggressive recycling program prevents physical material from being wasted, the basic principle of entropy still prevails. We lose energy out of the system that has to be replaced with fresh power from the ship's engines. But preservation and conservation can only go so far. As our stores are depleted, and as physical goods are created, sold, and kept, our energy use accelerates. What's more, between quality medical technology, a relatively safe environment, and people being people, our population is increasing. The first 'ship children' were born in 3085, and in 3086 the birth rate exceeded the death rate, something that every model indicates will continue, given that only a very few members of the expedition were over the age of fifty when we left Coral. The resource situation therefore isn't likely to get better any time soon, and that not only has a direct effect on the people but also various secondary ones, including the viability of our economy."

"I follow you," Ryland said, "and I certainly can't argue with any of those points." Lyon nodded as well.

"Then I'm sure that the two of you appreciate that there are only two real possibilities for resolving the problem."

"I think so. Either we leave the ship, which functionally means settling on Ragol, or we find a way to put fresh energy into the system from an outside source, the way a planet gains energy from its sun."

Severin smiled.

"That's exactly it. And what we're working on is a project that will facilitate the latter objective."

"A new energy source?"

"Precisely. A Photon collector, designed to absorb and store the background elemental Photon energy present on Ragol, which could then be used to supplement _Pioneer 2_ 's engines."

"I don't understand," Lyon said. "Why would something like that be a secret project? That helps all of us. I'd think that the Lab would give immediate approval to pursue research along those lines that showed even a marginal chance of success."

"And in an ideal world, that would be true. But we don't live in an ideal world."

"You can say that again. But seriously, I don't follow. Where does the objection come from?"

"Two places, actually. First of all, the design could never have been perfected without Arin's input in making the calculations. That's something that any scientist being shown the underlying concept would pick up on in an instant. If I were Dr. Montague, a genius in multiple fields of Photon research, then I might be able to pass it off, but I have no trouble...well, not _much_ trouble...admitting that I'm not on his level. So, getting approval for this plan would force me to explain and justify Arin's existence, and I'm not ready for that, as yet. In its way, the success of the Photon collector is also the success of my ARIN system for artificial intelligence creation. Secondly, the—"

"Could I?" Ryland interjected.

"Of course."

"Secondly, the Photon collector represents a large step forward in terms of _Pioneer 2_ 's self-sufficiency. Without it or something like it, we would have to either settle on Ragol, which is clearly not a viable solution so long as the Dark Falz problem remains, well, problematic, or we would need to have supplemental resources brought to us from Coral by way of a _Pioneer 3_ or something similar."

"And if we need support from Coral to remain a viable colony, then obviously we can't declare independence from them!" Lyon realized. "If a kid moves out of their parents' home, then the parents aren't going to give them a cash stipend to fund their life."

"That's right, which means that any _anti_ -independence movement has a huge stake in killing this project before it gets off the ground. As a senior Lab official, it's not surprising that Dr. Severin should be aware of some of the political concerns. As a researcher, regardless of his own political stance, he'd want to pursue knowledge first and decide what to do with it later. Publish or suppress, the goal is the same."

"Very good, both of you. You have it exactly."

"And Kane fits in because you needed a hunter when it came time to deploy the machine to Ragol."

"Right again. Miss Sena knew him already, through some of her informal discussion groups. Kane had a passionate belief in protecting the environment, and a project to supply clean energy from naturally-occurring Photon rather than consuming reaction fuels appealed strongly."

Remembering some of the articles in Kane's res-unit, like the natural-fiber blanket, Lyon started to understand.

"Too passionate," she said, "if he was willing to surrender his life. Too much passion, and not enough rational thought."

"He assumed keeping the target data from our employer was worth the price," Ryland said. "Taking out that data and throwing it into the sea would have given us the chance to freeze, slow, or paralyze him, keeping him from completing the throwing motion. He didn't realize that our client was as happy to see that data destroyed as retrieved. Although, we didn't know that, either, so it's not unreasonable for him to be confused."

Lyon shook her head.

"It isn't right. As a hunter, he should have known the stakes going in."

"Stop trying to turn this into Kane's fault!" Sena hissed. "You're the ones who hunted him down to his death!"

"He threw himself off a cliff for no good reason, and the fact that he had so much passion for the cause that he'd do that is exactly why he let his rational thought be eclipsed. We—and the Administration—pressed this investigation because we assumed he was a violent terrorist involved in some destructive plot!" Lyon shot back. "Usually people like you who resort to paranoid murder on a reflex aren't working for good ends!"

Sena looked like she was about to see if her bare fists worked any better against android armor than her gun had, except that Arin spoke up to intervene.

"Please, everyone, recriminations are not productive even if they prove to be accurate. There is plenty of blame to go around to all of us, but even more to be associated with the direct action of rival factions and the lack of communication which was necessitated by the importance of keeping the project secret from those factions."

"Except that didn't happen," Ryland said. "As a matter of fact, someone _did_ find out about what you were doing. They're the ones who hired us to stop Kane, through the fixer Rahn Solus. And given Solus's subsequent murder, and the attempt to kill Lyon and me, it's clear that someone is still actively at work, either trying to steal your work or destroy it."

"And given that those people are also trying to kill _us_ ," Lyon added, "I think our joining forces is a good idea."


	10. Chapter 10

"The one thing I'm not clear on, though," Ryland said, "is why, exactly, we were sent after Kane in the first place. What was the target data we were sent to obtain, and which Solus and our ultimate employer were happy to have destroyed? Some kind of test results from your machine?"

"Yes," Severin said. "Under cover of other projects, we were able to construct a test facility on Gal Da Val Island, in the Mountain Area. Its test operations completed their initial cycle two days ago, and Kane was sent to retrieve the results so that we could analyze them and see if we'd achieved a practical success."

The Force thought that over.

"I assume that the difficulties in surface-to-ship communications channels are why it had to be picked up physically; you couldn't break confidentiality."

"That's correct. As they say, it's easier to ask forgiveness than seek permission, particularly if you ask forgiveness with a working prototype in hand."

Lyon decided that Dr. Severin had a definite preference for that approach to his more creative research projects. Rina had been built along those same lines, and now Arin and the Photon collector.

"But what I don't see is how stopping one hunter is going to stop you from just going back and having someone else get another copy of the data. They don't even need to be involved in the project. Solus shouldn't have been anywhere near as happy as he was."

Severin offered a nod.

"Ordinarily, you'd be right. The problem is that the data Kane retrieved was a unique copy."

"How can data be unique?" Lyon asked.

"It was hard-encoded onto a single-use, write-only data recorder as the test machine functioned," Arin explained. "Thus, it could not be altered, nor a fresh copy of backup files be made."

"Why would you do that?"

"Accountability," Ryland came up with the answer before Severin could explain. "Dr. Severin is going to present his test data to various people, some of whom have strong motives to discredit it. Anyone with a stake in maintaining strong ties to Coral will be seeking any excuse to dismiss the entire idea. After all, it's hard work to debate options and reach a conclusion. It's a lot easier to pick a conclusion first and throw out all the options that lead down other paths."

"You're exactly right," Dr. Severin told him. "The data Kane was bringing back would have been unassailable proof that the Photon collector works as designed—presuming, of course, that the data was indeed favorable. There were, after all, assorted failures on the way to completing the machine that we eventually designed."

"What I don't understand is, why is this operation still active?" Ryland posed a question of his own. "Not your team's, Doctor, but the opposition. Why kill Solus? Why try to kill us? Speaking of which, Lyon, would you simple-mail Naomi and Gowan to watch their backs? If Kyle and Brackley came after us because we were investigating that's one thing, but if it's part of a general clean-up with someone exterminating Solus and the team both, they'll be in danger, too."

"I'll do it right now," she said, and suited her actions to her words.

"Now," Ryland continued, "I assume that the killing of Solus and the attacks on us weren't done by this group or by someone else associated with you?" He shot a sharp look at Sena, indicating that he wasn't entirely ready to dismiss the idea of _her_ being some kind of radical terrorist. "Specifically, while I can see Sena, here, being willing to seek revenge, Arin had to identify us for her before she tried to take precipitate action. If she was already trying to kill us, she'd have known, and been faster on the draw. We further know that the military covered up Solus's death as an accident. They don't want matters to escalate beyond their current situation."

"Sure, I get that," Lyon said. "The military is anti-independence. They definitely don't want this project to succeed, because it would cut them off from support on Coral and leave their power base as an undergunned, undermanned force barely able to stand on its own. The last thing they want is for _general_ knowledge of this technology to get out and around. Then some Administration group that's pro-independence might pick up on it, commission projects for further study, knowledge could get out into the public sphere, and the whole thing ends up steamrolling them."

"Indeed, we could do that now, were it not for the personal consequences to members of this team," Arin noted.

"Plus the fact that without the test machine data, we still don't know if we're sitting on a brilliant new technology or just a theory that offers a promising direction for long-term future study."

"Mr. Almonte is correct about that," Dr. Severin said. "And it makes a significant difference in how we can move forward."

"Except that your description of the way the test data was recorded suggests that you're kind of screwed, aren't you?" Lyon was blunt about it, but there really wasn't any point in beating around the bush.

"True, but Arin believes that he can retrieve that test data. It won't be as effective evidence of what was accomplished from a political standpoint, but from the scientific perspective and its utility for future work it will serve just as usefully."

"The old, 'you can't prove you're not lying, but if you know you're not it still points you in the right way' argument. It works the same way in an investigation: something might not serve as legal evidence, but still be a vital clue."

Lyon wondered if Ryland might be pushing the metaphor a bit, but decided not to say anything as it would just be unproductive snark.

"The question is, why are you waiting?" he continued.

"The data retrieval has to be done from Ragol's surface. The same communications issues I mentioned before still exist, so that someone needs to go down with a terminal to enable Arin to access the test machine. This is our one and only chance at this, and we can't risk failure."

"So hire a hunter team," Lyon said. "That's kind of obvious."

Sena directed a scathing glare in her direction.

"You _killed_ the hunter on our team, or did you forget that among all the other murders you commit?"

"I don't know whether to be annoyed by her continuous rewriting of the facts in her delusions, or gratified that she confuses android memory function with organic, suggesting that she thinks of you like any other person," Ryland mused.

"I know which way I see it. And I said to _hire_ hunters, which says to me that she doesn't pay any more attention to words as she does to facts."

Almonte sighed. Lyon figured that he had that reaction a lot to the situations his coworker got into, especially since unlike Dr. Severin he didn't have the authority to order her to obey or just shut up.

"Miss Sena does have a point," Arin remarked.

"She does?" Lyon asked.

"Quite. As I noted, this would, functionally, be the absolute last chance for us to obtain the test data. We already know that our rivals are not above hiring hunters to oppose us. The risk therefore exists that any hunter employed on a strictly mercenary basis may prove to be in the secret employ of our rivals."

"That's actually valid. A certain number of hunters are actually field agents for the military, the Lab, Black Paper, or some other group, who obtained Guild membership to give them access to Ragol for whatever their faction needed instead of having to use mercenaries for the job. It's pretty well-known that that guy Sakon was a WORKS officer, and Mujo and Duranbo were arrested as members of Black Paper due to the kidnapping incident in 3084," Ryland explained. "Which means, if I was one of those and from an opposing group, I'd jump at a quest Dr. Severin offered, just to get the chance to wreck it."

"Put like that, you're probably right," Lyon said, as much as it galled her to admit it.

"There's an easy answer to that problem, though."

"Oh?" Dr. Severin asked.

"Certainly. You could just hire us." Ryland smirked at him as if the answer was obvious. Which, in retrospect, it basically was.

~X X X~

"Your object lesson didn't work."

Valgarde's expression was searing, the scowl furious. The other two members of the military command staff felt the heat of his wrath.

"They got wind of Solus's death somehow," Colonel Zanov said. "We tried to put a lid on it, but the hunters arrived while the crime scene was still being sterilized. Laleham did his best, but given that the hunters were obviously forewarned to expect that a murder had taken place, denials weren't going to distract them. Only a credulous fool or a complete naïf would believe the accident story under those circumstances."

"Neither of which description applies to competent, active hunters," declared the third man in the room. Deputy Commander Yves Elberg was nearly as tall as Valgarde, but lean, without the Commander's muscular form and dominating physical presence—a sword rather than a greataxe. "You're sure that Laleham didn't do anything to tip them off? His file indicates those two hunters are among his regular contacts in the Guild."

"I'm sure. I've got two people on his staff reporting directly to me," Zanov said. "Both confirmed that the Inspector stuck to the story and that he sent no messages later on."

"And there's no chance that _your_ hunters will give away their affiliation?"

Zanov shook his head.

"They don't _know_ their affiliation. We used a cut-out in the hiring. Kyle and Brackley no more know that they were working for us than Ryland and the android did."

"Not that it would be particularly difficult for our nosy pair to figure out, especially now that they've made contact with Dr. Severin." Elberg glanced from Zanov to Valgarde and back again. "Don't you think it's time to pull back on this one? Things are starting to get out of hand; we're having shooting wars on board _Pioneer 2_. With multiple incidents already, we're threatening to drive the Administration and the Lab to a united front over our inability to police the violence if nothing else. And if they're able to directly connect us to any serious incident, then the political impact of Dr. Severin's Photon collection technology won't matter to any of us. We'll be lucky to get off as easy as Leo Grahart."

"And if we don't, the entire _military_ is left in the same boat," Valgarde retorted.

Elberg frowned, but did not say anything. His change in expression was noted by Zanov, however, to judge by the slight narrowing of the Colonel's eyes.

"One thing is plain," Zanov said. "Based upon our new intelligence, Dr. Severin's team has managed to overcome the blow we inflicted yesterday and have come up with a new approach towards retrieving the target data. This must be stopped at all costs."

"What? You're telling me that all we got was one day? That was supposed to have crippled that prototype?"

"I know." Zanov scowled. "Scientists, there's nothing else I can say to it. Their creativity knows entirely too few bounds, often running in completely unexpected directions."

"That's true enough," Elberg muttered. "For all the trouble we've had with Milarose, it's nothing compared to what _Pioneer 1_ 's military had to put up with thanks to Osto Hyle being given his head. Just imagine what we'd have to deal with if Montague had the same authority!"

"Point taken, but also not relevant. Zanov, what's involved in this 'new approach' of theirs?"

"Something involving linking the AI directly to the test machine."

"Damn it. Our electronic warfare efforts have been completely stymied by that thrice-damned CALS system, and now this!" Valgarde clenched a big hand into a fist. "Give me an enemy that I can _fight_ , damn it, not machines that drift around on the net, politicians that take away the point of the battle before it starts, and scientists whose _ideas_ upend the entire playing field and redefine the very concept of the fight before it even happens!"

In all honesty, Elberg could not find it in himself to disagree with his commanding officer's sentiments.

"But!" Valgarde went on. "You've actually given me hope for this instance, Colonel."

Zanov thought for no more than a couple of seconds before the answer came to him.

"You mean, because this plan involves a direct visit to Ragol."

"Correct. Regardless of the electronic trickery involved, this operation brings our enemies directly within the military's primary specialty: the application of overwhelming physical force in the field."

~X X X~

"So let me get this straight," Naomi said. "You're taking a Guild Quest on Gal Da Val."

"Correct."

"For which we are tasked with running security for a Lab operation."

"Correct."

"The objective of which operation is to retrieve certain target data from a test installation."

"Again, correct."

"Which we ourselves _prevented_ from being retrieved during a previous job _just yesterday_?"

Ryland smirked at her.

"Four for four."

"Good grief," she concluded, shaking her head. "I know that hunters are mercenary freelancers, but working opposite sides of the same mission on back-to-back days is a little much, don't you think?"

"Well, I can't really argue with you on the point," Ryland admitted. "In this case, though, it's more like we're making amends by fixing what we messed up the first time."

They'd met up in the atrium below the shopping arcade in the Guild area of the Lab wing. The entire wall was a plasteel bubble, showing the outside of the ship: in fact, it was possible to see part of the "wing" structure where the Lab facilities were located if one looked out the aft side of the curved bubble. The vista was impressive, to say the least, though definitely not for the acro- or agoraphobic.

"Uh-hm. But not 'making amends' for free, I presume?"

"No, that part of mercenary we're still living up to."

"Motivation: guilt?" Gowan inquired.

"A little bit. The employer is Dr. Severin; we have a good relationship with him that we'd—well, I'd, though I think Lyon does, too?"

"Oh, yeah; at least Severin's willing to acknowledge when he lets scientific enthusiasm get out in front of common sense and apologize for his mistakes. Better yet, he actually doesn't do the same stupid thing twice. That puts him head and shoulders above most of those Lab hacks."

"There you have it. But mostly, it's because we agree with what he's trying to accomplish with this project, and we'd like to make amends for screwing it up."

"I don't think that's the guilt Gowan was talking about," Naomi said. "Right, partner?"

"Assessment: correct."

"You mean the hunter, then. Selfas Kane's suicide?"

Gowan nodded, the gesture causing a dull whirring sound. RAcasts were definitely not modeled for stealth.

"Well, yes and no," Lyon answered. "Kane's death was why we started in the first place. I was really bothered by the events and was trying to understand why he would do something like that."

"Really, it was you, not Ryland? I thought he was the one who loved mysteries and conspiracies?"

"I am," the Force said, "but when it comes to empathy for her fellow beings, Lyon clearly beats me."

"Okay, I kind of see that. I guess it's one of those android/organic things; Gowan's nicer than I am, too."

"Difficulty: minimal."

"Ouch!" Ryland laughed.

"Careful, rust-bucket. You can be replaced by someone that can talk, y'know!"

"Viability: unlikely."

"Hey, responding to smartass remarks is no place for logic. But anyway, why _isn't_ this about causing Kane's death? I mean, I'm the hard-bitten 'life is tough sometimes' hunter girl and even I was a little shaken when he stepped off that cliff."

"Essentially, it's because we discovered that his primary motivation for his extreme actions was his own extreme belief in the rightness of his cause, his dedication to building a new society to correct the wrongs of the old. Those were positive beliefs—honestly, as far as I can tell, I basically agree with the principles—but following them to a fanatical level could only lead to tragedy. I feel sorry for his death, but now that I understand the facts it's confirmed that I do not feel responsible. Like I said to Ryland before, lacking a subconscious I don't conflate my proximity to the situation with actually feeling guilty for it."

"Logic: impeccable."

"I still envy it being that easy," Ryland put in.

"The ridiculous efficiency of the organic brain has to come from somewhere, and sometimes the shortcuts it takes are less useful than others."

"Just for the record, though, I'm still going to keep my brain the way it is," Naomi said. "No uploading it into a mechanical body or anything for me."

"I wonder if that would work?" Ryland mused. "Especially in such a way that it preserves the integrity of the individual, not just makes a copy of that person."

"Topic: digression."

Lyon laughed.

"You get used to it when you hang around with Ryland for long enough. But anyway, the bottom line is, we think it's a good idea that we help Dr. Severin with his project, especially since we mucked it up in the first place. I mean, while we didn't do anything wrong as hunters, I think we should have asked Solus a few more questions about the nature of the job before we took it, and maybe walked away if we didn't like the answers."

"But if you did that, the hunters who _did_ take the job might not have looked deeper, and wouldn't be in a position to help out now," Naomi said.

"Except that Severin might just have come to us anyway, meaning that all we'd have different now is that fewer people would have shot at us. Mostly at me!"

"Possibly, but in that case we wouldn't know anything about Solus's death, the military's involvement, or the background matters you learned from Irene."

They'd discharged their obligation to Irene by reporting that Kane had been working for a Lab scientist on a research project that was not a direct threat to the ship or the Administration (although the potential for factional strife getting out of hand was always there, just like on any important issue), and that the suicide had been due to Kane's personal extremism, not that of the project director or the project's nature. The rest had been left confidential, and Irene hadn't pushed. That didn't mean that she wasn't _curious_ , but she knew Lyon well enough to trust her assessment.

"That's true, then. So maybe it did go all right after all."

"I'm more interested in the 'getting shot at' part. Who's after you?"

Ryland glanced over at Naomi.

"We're not completely sure. The military is our best guess, but it could be someone else sticking their nose in as well."

"Joy, so no more than when you first warned us. Any way you cut it, though, you're expecting trouble down on Ragol?"

"Definitely. This operation is going to be more complex to execute than the one Kane was running, but we're after the same goal as he was. If Solus's client tried to stop that one, I don't see why he, she, or they wouldn't try it again."

"So trouble, then."

"Well," Ryland said, "given that the last time someone tried to stop this operation, they hired _us_ , so what do you think?"

Lyon batted his ponytail so that it swung around, the end tickling his nose so that the ensuing sneeze wiped the smirk off his face.


	11. Chapter 11

"Isn't it risky to install your test apparatus in this area?" Ryland asked as the group ascended the mountain, traveling up a narrow pass that ran between two high cliff walls.

"The last time we came here," Sena said, "we only had Kane as our escort. I'd have thought the four of you were capable of doing this job without particular nervousness."

"Just to verify," Naomi said, "she wasn't actually shooting at you last time, Lyon, but at your partner?"

"He's a slow learner," Lyon replied.

"Cute," Ryland murmured. "And while frankly caution is always a good idea here on Ragol, I wasn't referring to the danger."

"What, then?" Almonte asked. The two Lab technicians wore their high-collared, bell-sleeved tunics and snug trousers, white with blue piping, as they had before, but had added to the outfit with the defensive fields of standard-issue Photon frames and Varista handguns, standard equipment for Lab personnel on dangerous field missions. Ryland would just as soon have done without Sena, but there were good reasons for her to be there, so her unpredictable nature and open hostility just became part of what they had to put up with.

 _And after all, every hunter knows that the biggest operational hazard on any escort mission is the person being escorted._

They were interrupted by an example of the local wildlife as they emerged into a clearing: seven- and eight-foot-tall gibbons, with tough, wiry body and savagely long arms leaping from the rocks and underbrush, breathing fire and ice. Naomi and Lyon rushed forward into battle, tying up the monsters well away from the Lab techs, while Ryland stuck close to Almonte and Gowan to Sena even while adding fire support. Their combined efforts swiftly dispatched the apes, and then a swarm of wasp-like Gees that buzzed in, disturbed by the noise and commotion to protect their nests.

"Like I said, no, I didn't mean the threat from these indigenous creatures when I talked about risk. Yes, there's safer areas on Ragol than Gal Da Val Island, but dealing with monsters is part of the normal routine of operating anywhere on the planet. No, I was talking about the Gibbles."

"Gibbles?" Almonte asked, looking genuinely curious.

"Alphas, pack leaders for the Ul and Zol Gibbons like the ones we just fought. They're exceptionally aggressive, not just against people but anything strange that enters their territory. The Lab lost a handful of its initial unmanned probes that they sent to this island to them. If one noticed your equipment and got ornery…" He shrugged.

"Mission failed. I see what you mean. Unfortunately, we didn't always have those kind of options."

"Is this the experimental area Dr. Severin's team was assigned for its projects? Or is it some aspect of the ambient Photon energy that's the issue?"

"The latter. We're already starting to work on ways to extract Photon from different types of environments as well as analyzing what kinds of effects might be caused on the local ecosystem to avoid harming anything inadvertently, but this seemed to be the one environment that we were compatible with."

"Waterborne Photon, especially, seems to be difficult to extract without a toxicity effect, and that's something we'd never implement in a real-life test model," Sena added. "The initial plan, in fact, was to set up in a Photon-rich cave in the Jungle Area, but we had to rule it out because of the simulation results."

"Thankfully, Dr. Severin was able to work an exchange with Dr. Guls's team to get access to a viable test site…although we've gone outside our strictly assigned test area."

"That makes sense, or else your opposition could just send down hunters to destroy everything in sight."

"I'm surprised that no one tried that already," Lyon said. "I mean, they obviously had reliable intel or they couldn't have sent us after Kane."

"The primary objective probably wasn't destruction," Ryland speculated. "Our first goal was to retrieve the test data, after all. I think they wanted to know if Dr. Severin's idea worked, so that they could move to control the technology if they wanted, or just save time and resources if it proved to be a failure. It's always more useful to a smart planner to keep their options open."

"You're calling most of the plans we run into smart?" she shot back dryly.

"Greedy, selfish, and shortsighted, perhaps, but functional enough. Also, there's the additional fact that every field mission is one more chance to be exposed and caught. This goes double when the mission is potentially loud and messy."

"Okay, I'll buy that one. On a one-or-the-other basis, it adds up to reason enough for someone to play this cagily."

"Of course, _now_ is a different matter. I agree that whomever is going to come after us will do it in full force before we're through. I wish we didn't have to clear the path for them," he added, glancing at the remains of the battle. "It would be nice if our enemies had to spend their time, energy, and resources on these monsters instead of us."

"Timing: unfortunate," Gowan summed up.

"You can say that again."

His sense of humor didn't run to the awful pun, though, so he didn't.

"Which way from here?" Ryland asked Almonte. The technician checked a map on his PDL and pointed.

"West, then south and west again."

They proceeded towards their goal, dealing with more gibbons on the way, seasoned with a couple of those weird mobile flowers that would uproot themselves and chase encroachers.

"Damn, I don't think I'm ever going to get used to those things," Naomi muttered, ripping her Victor Axe loose from the rapidly decaying remains of the last Meriltas. The way the fallen vegetation rotted and dissolved to green sludge was a sure sign, Ryland had once pointed out, that the creatures had been infected with the D-Factor. "Every time I get back to the ship after a job where I have to fight them, I keep expecting the decorative shrubbery to jump out of the flowerbeds and start chasing me."

"If it's any consolation, I think that you only have to worry about that in the Lab. These things were transformed by the D-Factor, and we don't have that on _Pioneer 2_."

"You hope," Naomi said darkly.

"This is why I'm glad that Chief Milarose is only an evil schemer and not a complete nut. She's liable to get us in all sorts of trouble with her plotting, but meddling with uncontrolled science or things that could be described as evil deities aren't among the kinds of trouble she's liable to create."

"Yeah, we're definitely better off than _Pioneer 1_ was, but who knows what kind of other nonsense _they_ created that _we're_ going to need to deal with? I've heard the rumors about Olga Flow in that seabed facility, that it's another regenerating monster like Dark Falz. How much of this crap can we find a way to beat before we have to face facts and admit Ragol is a total loss, especially with all of that political crap going on behind the scenes and getting in the way of us being able to just do our job as hunters?"

"I never realized that you were such an idealist."

"Well, geez, I'm not, but the more that I have to put up with as a hunter, the more that I just get sick of all the crap. At least this guy Severin we're working for now, he's trying to do something that'll fix some of the problems. Maybe it's for the right reasons and maybe it's just for his ego or scientific curiosity or all that, but at least he's doing _something_ , trying _something_ in the right direction. Actually makes me feel kinda bad, being on the other side last time out."

"Yeah, I feel the—camouflage!" Lyon yelped, cutting herself off and pointing. It had just been a tiny thing, a slight shimmer at the corner of her field of vision, like a heat haze where there shouldn't be one, but she'd yelled and pointed anyway, since like all four of the hunters she knew damned well what that meant.

Even then, she was almost too late. Her shout went up in the same instant that the blur moved, hurtling from its position on top of one of the rock walls bordering the clearing down towards the heart of the hunters' formation. If Gowan hadn't been an android, too, it might have been too late, but the RAcast was slightly better at tracking the motion of the Photon-camouflaged attacker's path than their organic companions and roughly thrust Sena away with one big hand.

"Hey! What the—" she began as she was flung several feet away and hit the ground with bruising force, but she fell silent, cut off by the grating squeal of metal on metal, sparks flying as Gowan's right arm and side ground hard against the camouflaged enemy. The field flickered and died, revealing a bulky humanoid robot, bigger even than Gowan, with a tanklike structure on its back and painted in green and white colors.

There was neither the time nor the opportunity for Gowan to get free of it to line up a rifle shot; instead he used the laser like a club, swinging it around to crash the butt into the Sinow Berril's shoulder structure. The impact jolted the robot, knocking it back slightly so that the swinging punch it was trying to deliver only grazed Gowan's midsection instead of hitting him dead on.

Lyon and Naomi charged towards the battle at once, but the others were already in action. Knowing the Berril model was insulated against electrical attack, Ryland speared it with Barta instead, while Almonte fired his Varista into the thing and Sena did the same from her seated position. The consistent pounding did its job, and the rogue security robot was already starting to fall apart by the time Lyon thrust the blade of her gungnir into its back.

"I-if you hadn't shoved me aside," Sena stammered while Ryland was treating the damage Gowan had incurred.

"Obligation: security."

"Translated, it's the job," Naomi said, offering the woman a hand up. "Getting you two safely to the test site is what we're here for."

"Even so…"

Lyon supposed it wasn't surprising, Sena's sudden…she wouldn't call it _friendliness_ , but at least a lack of hostility. More than likely, this was the first time the woman had come face-to-face with something that was actually trying to kill her and had the capacity to do so. Before now, she'd likely only have had standard firearms training on the VR field or otherwise; for all her bloody-minded nonsense and willingness to try to shoot Ryland, she didn't seem like the kind of person who'd actually confronted the reality of possible death. There was a big difference between sitting around planning how the "bad guys" of any ideology ought to be destroyed, and facing off against the violence going the other way.

More than that, the things she was facing now, the monsters of Ragol, they didn't have any ideology. Oh, they could be traced back to _Pioneer 1_ 's bioweapon experiments, but even those didn't cross over into explaining Dark Falz. For Sena, this wasn't just new, but completely outside the context by which she defined her life. She had no functional way of looking at a threat like this, but had to build the mental architecture from scratch.

Ryland loved conspiracies and mysteries, and one of the things he maintained about fanatics of any stripe is that they ascribed evil, the threats that people faced, to overly simplified causes: "the military" or "science" or "foreigners" or whatever was labeled the problem, the root cause to be hated. Along those lines, Lyon figured that Sena had just been punched in the teeth with an example of things not being so simple.

She hoped the lesson took. The soul-searching Sena would go through over how much of an idiot she'd been would be a much more satisfying revenge for her idiotic attempt to shoot Ryland than anything Lyon might actually do _to_ her.

"Let's get going," Ryland said. "We're wasting time."

"Wasting time?" Almonte asked. "What do you mean? There's no deadline for completing this mission that I know about. According to Arin, there's no threat of data decay…"

"Or is it because night will fall?" Sena asked. "Do the monsters become more active or stronger ones emerge after dark?" It wasn't hard to divine the nature of her thoughts.

"Monsters, no, but you can bet that we'll be looking at a different kind of opposition."

"Hunters, most likely, unless someone gets really creative in their operations."

Both technicians looked at him in surprise.

"Your project has been compromised, remember?" he spelled it out for them. "When we came down here before to intercept Kane, it wasn't on a hunch. Our client _knew_ Kane would be here to retrieve data. They _knew_ what he was up to and when he'd been up to it. I see no reason to think they don't know what we're doing now."

"And if they wanted to stop it the first time, they'll want to stop it again," Naomi put in.

"So let's not waste what time we have. Why did you think I was complaining earlier about having to clear the way for someone else? Someone's going to be after us. It's just a matter of whom and how soon."

Almonte and Sena glanced at each other. Both swallowed nervously.

"Okay, let's move."

"Good call."

There was one more monster encounter on the way, but thankfully, there weren't any of the Sinow robots involved and the hunters were able to bring down several of the gibbons at long range before the creatures could get close enough to harm the group. They went around a corner and into a kind of nook. It was surrounded by rock walls on two sides, and half of it was shadowed by an overhang, but in the part of the area open to the sky sat what was obviously their quarry. The machine was large, about the size of an aerocar, and had a slight resemblance to the cylindrical weather observation devices found in the former residential area near the Central Dome. The major difference was two large computer terminals on either end, and an elevated windmill, eight feet in diameter inside a heavy, ringlike frame, each blade glistening oddly in the light from a coating laid on to it in hexagon-shaped panels.

"The collection device could be static," Almonte explained, "but we found that a mobile one works better for absorbing atmospheric Photon, flowing with the wind." Lyon and Naomi glanced at each other and the Newman rolled her eyes. Neither one of them had any interest, just then, in the esoterica of Photon energy technology.

"Let's just get to work."

While Sena and Almonte started setting up, Lyon went to the mouth of the nook and took up an overwatch position, drawing her Varista, while Gowan joined her. Between the two of them, they would be able to keep all of the potential approach routes within their field of vision. At the nearest chokepoint, they laid down a pattern of hovering traps, so that an enemy charging in blindly would soon be frozen, confused, and fireblasted.

"Do you think one of us should advance and take up a picket position?" she asked.

"Retreat: difficult."

"Yeah, you have a point. And I'd be the one to advance, since your rifle's the better weapon for overwatch. I'd be exposed almost the entire time while fleeing back from that outcropping up there if they approach from the north. And if they approach from the east, I wouldn't see them any sooner because of the slope." Remaining in her present position was probably the best option, then. "Keep an eye on your navigational unit's radar, though. That'll give us a little range to the north around the rock wall where we can't see. Of course, the same goes for us. They'll be able to spot our position and be ready to face an ambush…but there's still a lot of open ground that way. They'd be out of range for Zonde or Grants from back there except at the highest power levels, and if they've got a Force that strong…"

She broke off, realizing that Gowan had almost certainly considered the same tactical factors and come to the same conclusions.

"Sorry."

"Apology: unnecessary."

"Well, the babbling was unnecessary, too."

"Babble: accurate."

"Do you mean I was accurate in what I was saying or accurate in calling it babble?"

"Acknowledgement: both."

"…You're smirking at me right now, I can tell."

"Mouth: absent."

"You're older than I am and I know you've spent more than enough time around organics to know that a smirk isn't a facial expression but a state of mind."

Reflecting on the oddity of an emotional algorithm that increased the priority of solidifying relationships with others—even another android—through conversation and banter when a highly dangerous situation was anticipated, Lyon settled in to wait.

~X X X~

"Are you finished?" Colonel Zanov asked, his voice harsh.

It was as he'd reported in the meeting of senior officers. The fact that Dr. Severin and his team had further pursued their research was not a surprise. A dedicated person in any field did not choose to abandon their work because of one setback. A death, yes, was an extremely _serious_ setback, but even the Lab types were not lacking in courage. Whether driven by private obsession, personal glory, or political ambition, the scientists of _Pioneer 2_ were not weak fools to be disregarded.

There was a reason, after all, that the military was in the state that it was, losing influence, hemmed in on all sides by its rivals. Like Leo Grahart before them, Valgarde and Zanov had been driven to desperate actions to keep from losing everything,

It was not a comforting thought, given that 32nd WORKS had been destroyed despite its decades of history, Leo barely able to escape with his life only by the grace of the hunters that had preserved him, the legacy he'd hoped to leave for his daughter destroyed, Karen left to forge her own way with a stain on her family name, half or more of her network of contacts shunning her and anything else than bore a hint of the Grahart name.

Zanov would not allow that to happen to _Pioneer 2_ 's army. Not while he still had breath in his body. It was them, the military, who had fought in the wars on Coral, who had shed blood, killed and watched friends die. Ragol was theirs by right, the hope a new planet offered their reward for the price they'd paid, the Avalon waiting at the end of their journey. Not the fat, smiling worms of the Administration who sat at their desks and sent good men and women to die. Not the scientists squirreled away in their laboratories, spewing out new horrors to kill with like rats swarming from a plague-pit. _Theirs!_

"The calibrations are almost complete," the technician said, her head and arms still half-buried in the teleporter console. "We'd had to make a lot of adjustments as it was to allow us to use this teleporter to access restricted areas."

The strike force was currently waiting in No Man's Mines, the excavation route dug by _Pioneer 1_ to reach for the ruins where Dark Falz had been sealed. Here, too, had been the initial Lab facilities from that expedition, before they'd moved to Gal Da Val, and the stench of misspent science was everywhere. This was where the Beta 772 experiments had taken place, the bioweapon analysis that had led to the plague of mutated monsters roaming the cave complex.

These thoughts were just a reminder to Zanov of how the Lab needed to be kept under control, limits imposed on what it was doing for the good of all.

This area of the mine had been designated for military use, and they'd taken advantage of it. The teleporter that Sergeant Marks was working on had been repurposed to give them access to the Seabed facility off Gal Da Val, the core of the _Pioneer 1_ Lab's most secret research, access that the Administration had ruled that they weren't supposed to have.

"There!" Marks said. "I've reset it with the new coordinates, and I've reconfigured the signal jamming so our arrival won't be traced to this location." She crawled out from under, and began replacing the access panel.

"Why all the work?" one of the other soldiers asked. "Why not just input the coordinates and go?"

"Seriously? You're asking that now, Corbett? Sure, we could do that, but the jamming signal is only designed to cover transmittal from here to the seabed. It's like if you wore gray and black night-ops camouflage to sneak around a desert at high noon. You'd stick out like a sore thumb. And _that's_ why I've got a sore back from spending the last hour stuck in this machine, so the Lab doesn't have all our butts in a sling for going where we're not supposed to."

"But we're clear now, correct?" Zanov interjected.

"Yes, sir. No one will know that a teleport from here to the island occurred. We'll need to return to _Pioneer 2_ by telepipe or Ryuker, however, since the teleporter on the other end wouldn't be jammed."

"Understood. That leaves only the actual scientists and hunters to report a military presence, but that won't matter because your orders are to eliminate them all."


	12. Chapter 12

Ryland watched carefully as Sena and Almonte set up the communications terminal. He'd seen ones like this before; they'd been developed for use with CALS to give remote access to Gal Da Val without having to use BEE transmission protocols. He had to admit that they were impressive pieces of technology and that they looked the part besides, all sleek curves and blue holo-panels.

This one, though, wasn't dedicated to CALS's use, but Arin's, and the aesthetic was spoiled somewhat by the cable that snaked out of the hovering terminal's underside.

"The test machine isn't set up for wireless access," Almonte explained, almost apologetically. "We wanted to make sure that it couldn't just be tapped by anyone wandering through. Even hardline access has data security measures, of course, but…"

"But at least Chief Milarose can't just drop one of those down here with a remote probe and have CALS do the rest without fighting through the firebreathing monkeys."

Almonte flashed him a grin.

"You get it."

"So now what?"

"Now," Sena said, "we boot up the terminal and try to arrange the connection to Arin. He'll use this as part of his network, and be able to access the Photon collector. After that, it's up to him."

"Those terminals, they don't actually bypass _Pioneer 2_ 's communications network, do they? I mean, they do to the extent that they don't use BEE, and don't need any extra equipment on this end, but…"

"If you mean, do they still need the Lab's connection equipment on the other end, yes, they do. It doesn't just hook to Arin directly."

"Isn't that connection equipment overseen by CALS, though?" Ryland asked.

"In general, yes, but remember that we have an AI of our own supervising communications on our end, so that helps to cloak matters. CALS may have amazing capacities, but he isn't some kind of electronic deity."

Ryland nodded. Sena did have a point. He knew well that AIs could be overcome—witness Vol Opt being subsumed by Dark Falz's D-Factor infection. There was also the MOTHER project, whispers of which had filtered up through the backchannel rumor mill, something that Dr. Hyde and Dr. Montague had been working on during the early years of the Pioneer Project and continuing even after _Pioneer 1_ 's launch. Details were fuzzy, but it was believed that MOTHER was supposed to operate as a kind of superpriority system, capable of assuming control of any computer, even AIs, via direct Photon induction. There had been an incident in 3084 where a ship-wide computer lock-up had been rumored to be caused by MOTHER activating…

So no, CALS wasn't the be-all and end-all of computer control.

"Still, it's a matter of maintaining stealth, isn't it?" he mused. "It's not just if Arin can open a channel and keep it that way, but to keep CALS from noticing that it's happening at all to prevent our activity from being traced."

"That's true," Almonte agreed. "But we've run the simulations, and Arin believes that it's possible. And with the fate of the project on the line we owe him his chance to show what he can do as much as any of the rest of us."

Ryland glanced at Naomi, who caught the direction of his look and grinned.

"Don't even ask," she laughed. "This electronic stuff is so far over my head that it's not even on my radar. Basically, you can do it or you can't. If you can't, we're screwed, so what's the point in yapping about it?"

Ryland blinked. He did, after all, have a distinct tendency to "yap." Maybe that was why he'd partnered with an android, who had a literally inhuman degree of patience. _On the other hand, Naomi's dislike of rambling conversation probably explained why_ she _had a successful partnership with an android who had a damaged speech capacity_ , he couldn't resist thinking.

"I guess I can't argue with that," he said.

"We'll find out in a second, because we're initializing operations now," Sena said.

~X X X~

"Elly, I apologize for the interruption," CALS said, "but you did express a desire for me to tell you about any significant attempts at data incursions."

"What?" the Newman operator yelped, sitting bolt upright in her seat and nearly dropping the dataplate she'd been working on. "Someone's trying to hack you again?"

"Yes and no. There is a highly sophisticated attempt in progress to make use of ship-to-surface communications channels, bypassing BEE. The intruder was able to segregate a portion of the subnet before I noticed, establishing a secure barrier. I have only detected this now due to fluctuations caused by the data transfer volume."

"Someone was able to get past your security into Lab systems? Who? How?"

"I am not sure, as yet. The intrusion was very sophisticated, using an extremely high-grade system."

"Can you do anything about it?"

"Certainly. Now that I am aware of the intrusion, I will be able to penetrate the enemy security barriers, remove their control of the system, and most likely trace the hacking attempt back to its source."

Elly let out a sigh of relief.

"Oh, good! You had me really worried for a second, there, Cal." Dropping the dataplate on the console, she cracked her knuckles. "All right, then, it's time to show those guys who's boss. They've gone too far this time, messing with you to this extent! When we're through with them, they'll hide under their beds squealing before they so much as look at a computer!"

"How very evocative."

"Gah!" For the second time in two minutes, Elly yelped in surprise, swiveling her head up and to the right. "C-Chief Milarose!"

The redhead had actually walked over from her own desk to stand next to the CALS console. She looked down at Elly, a teasing smile on her lips, the expression of someone who knew more than those around her and took pleasure in those others knowing it.

"CALS, is the data intrusion threatening any Lab systems outside of ship-to-surface communications control?" Milarose asked.

"It has not."

"Hmm…And would you say that you yourself are at no present risk?"

"That is so," CALS agreed. "Having identified the data channels that have been compromised, I can secure and isolate them. No actual penetration of my own system was made, merely to those which are under my administrative control."

"In that case," she said, showing that little smile again, "why don't we let things continue as they are for a while?"

Elly blinked in surprise.

"You want to _let_ these people piggyback onto the Lab's communications systems, ma'am? But what if it's the military or another one of our rivals?"

"Oh, I don't think that's likely."

Elly had no idea what to say to a response like that.

"So for now, just continue to monitor the situation. CALS, of course, be certain to isolate the intrusion from extending any further, and once they disconnect you and Elly should work on a complete report of how this was accomplished and what revisions can be made to the security protocols to insure that it doesn't happen again. But for now, they've worked so hard, and it would be bad manners to make them walk away with nothing to show for it."

~X X X~

"The connection is in place, Dr. Severin," Arin reported. "The communications channel is stable, and I have access to the Photon collector's systems."

"I'm glad things are starting off well, at least. Have there been any problems?"

"At this stage, there have not. I was afraid that when I synchronized the terminal into my networked self there would be a leakage due to the excessive stress placed upon the data channel, but it appears that this was not the case."

"That's a relief."

"Indeed. I would not relish a confrontation with CALS. His hardware is superior."

"Considering the basic principle of your design is to allow you to operate on an inferior hardware base, I can't argue the point."

"It was an observation, not an accusation, Dr. Severin."

Severin's mouth quirked into a smile.

"You're developing a pawky sense of humor, Arin."

"Well…you programmed me, so I suppose that any responsibility in that area lies ultimately with you."

"I really need to work on that for the next model."

"Probably," Arin replied, deadpan.

"Can you calculate how long the process will take, now that you've been linked to the Photon collector?"

"Not with precision, but I would estimate approximately fifty beats."

"That could be worse. Unfortunately, we have to anticipate that our adversaries will make a move before then." He sighed and sat back in his chair. "I suppose all we can do is to pray that the hunters are as good as we hope they are."

~X X X~

The approach came from the north, showing up on Lyon's nav radar well before the military showed themselves.

"We've got bogeys!" she barked out. "I'm counting nine, plus…oh, I don't like this. There's a couple of signals there that aren't coming up humanoid."

"What, like robots?" Naomi called.

"I don't know, but they're definitely showing up as 'what' instead of 'whom.' I think we've got trouble."

"All right. Hey, gear up and get ready," the Newman barked towards the lab techs. "Not you," she amended, and cracked the butt of her axe into the base of Almonte's skull, dropping him before he could power up his frame.

"You're working for them!" Sena yelped.

"Actually, _he_ was," Ryland corrected. "And while he wasn't going to backstab us while we were facing monsters and rogue security robots that would kill him, too, now would be a perfect time. And unlike while you two were working on setting up Arin's terminal, I'm going to be a little busy to watch him."

"I don't believe you."

A couple of uniformed soldiers came half around the rock wall, one standing and one crouching so they could both take advantage of the cover. Each had a standard-issue blaster, with which they fired towards the hunters' position. Their shots were not aimed at Gowan and Lyon, though, but picked off the traps they'd set, destroying them before any of the soldiers came in range to trigger them. Apparently they'd anticipated the androids' tactic and came prepared with Trap Searches. The hunters' return fire blasted dust and shards from the rock face, and the soldiers danced back.

"Hey, we don't have time for Master Detective Theater, Ryland," Lyon called over the communications link. He just sighed, then called up Shifta and Deband for the team before continuing.

"Look, you already know that you were being spied on. It's the only way we could have been sent to stop Kane at exactly the right time. Our client _knew_ what Kane was going to do. The same thing's happening right now. It wasn't Dr. Severin, since it's his project. It wasn't Arin, because he's an AI built by Severin. It wasn't you, because you're…" He paused, no doubt censoring some of the more obvious word choices. "You're plainly sincere in your beliefs. By a process of elimination, Almonte is the spy."

"Then why not stop him _before_ he could call down this attack on us?" Sena accepted the logic—the good thing about paranoid tendencies being that it was easy to believe the possibility of betrayal—and switched gears.

"We had to draw out whomever he was reporting to somehow. The military was only the most obvious suspect. Without exposure, they'd just keep coming after us and sooner or later they'd pull off a successful assassination attempt. We didn't like that idea, so instead we're inviting them to show themselves in one big push when we know that they're coming."

" _That's_ the grand plan? Provoke a pitched battle with the _army_?"

"We didn't know it was the army when we started this. We _also_ didn't know that they'd be able to deploy an entire squad, plus vehicle support, to an area of Ragol the Lab is supposed to be controlling access to. We expected a hunter team."

"And now what?"

"Well, now, everyone's been talking about how the Guild represents a superior military force than the army while we've been working this job. I guess we get the chance to try and prove it."

She stared at him, incredulous. Ryland supposed he'd be pretty incredulous, too, in her place.

"Just stay here," he told her. "We need you alive and well to wrap up this operation." He slapped his hand against the rock wall. "They'll have to get past our line of defense to get a line of sight on you, so don't come out unless someone tells you."

"And if he wakes up," Naomi added, pointing to Almonte, "shoot him." She'd already taken his Varista, a more powerful weapon than her own railgun. "I don't want to get a technique in the back."

~X X X~

"The hunters have cover and more powerful weapons," Lieutenant Lawson reported to Zanov. "We'd have to cross open ground to rush their position."

"Well, that's why we brought those things," Zanov said, gesturing to the machines behind them. "Let's put them to use."

~X X X~

"They're bringing up the vehicles," Lyon reported, even though the other hunters were also likely able to see it on their own radar units. And then the first of the two yellow dots on the screen rounded the corner, she could actually see what it was, and she realized they'd been wrong. What was moving at them wasn't vehicles, but the giant blue bulk of two Baranz antipersonnel armored missile platforms.

The initial realization caught the hunters off-guard; these were _not_ what they'd expected to see. Indeed, they hadn't even known that the _Pioneer 2_ military had any of the things _to_ deploy against them. But they were professionals; their shock and surprise lasted only moments. The emotion didn't delay the androids at all; they were cycling into threat assessment routines almost instantly, opening fire as if synchronized, each targeting the one closer to them. Lyon's Varista shots pummeled the Baranz nearest to her, while Gowan targeted the one on his side with his laser's freezing unit, hoping to incapacitate it before it fired.

The organics were just behind them, Naomi adding her gunfire to Lyon's. Ryland, meanwhile, noticed that the human troopers were advancing behind the Baranzes, using the robots as mobile cover. He responded with his Rafoie technique, which detonated a fireblast centered on its target enemy. It did virtually nothing to the heat-shielded missile platforms, but human soldiers went over like ninepins. In the next moment, Gowan's third freezing shot took effect, bringing his target to a halt.

Then the first missiles hit.

Each initial salvo had been of four missiles. They slammed into Gowan and Lyon's positions, blasting the androids down. As they struggled to regain their feet, three soldiers charged forward, rushing up through the gap formed by one Baranz continuing to advance while the frozen one had stopped moving. They were obviously shock troops, wearing Photon armor and carrying gold-bladed rippers, high-performance Photon daggers meant for close combat against single enemies. Naomi growled, and rushed to meet the threat, swapping the handgun out for a massive Last Survivor, a giant sword that a designer with a weird sense of humor had built to look like a combat knife. The men's bodies shimmered with the auras of Shifta and Deband, indicating that they had technique-users among the squad, but Naomi flicked her hand at them, sending Jellen in their direction, and succeeded in overwriting their damage enhancement.

"They've got crap for support techs," she announced, whipping her sword in an arc that forced the attacking trio to jump back. "Probably just a Ranger."

"Got it!" Ryland said. He broke forward, risking getting nearer to the enemy's fire so he could get them in range of his own, powerful Jellen and Zalure.

The man Naomi was fighting broke formation to get out of the arc of her sword swings, one facing her directly while the others went left and right. Troopers began to pepper beam and blaster fire in the hunters' direction. Ryland grunted, taking two hits, but kept his focus enough to quickfire a Gizonde. The chained lightning hit the dagger-warrior charging him, then arced to the forward Baranz, lacing through its circuitry, then continuing to blast into several of the shooters as well.

Lyon put another shot into the damaged Baranz, and chunks of its ablative armor plates flew off, broken by the accumulated impacts. This, however, just revealed more missile ports, which launched their deadly ammunition all at once.

The second shock trooper came charging up behind Naomi, blades flashing as he tried to drive the rippers' points into her back. She mule-kicked before he could connect, hitting him in the gut just above the waistline. The Photon fields of his armor blocked most of the damage despite Naomi's Shifta-enhanced power, but it still knocked him back. When her foot hit the ground, she braced, then lunged forward, knocking the man before her into the path of the oncoming missiles. Four of them hit squarely, taking the trooper down, but the others piled into Naomi and Ryland.

"Gowan, Star!" Lyon yelped, continuing to pump shots into the Baranz. The second one would break free of its icy prison any second now, and if they didn't take this one down…

"Tactic: viable," the RAcast said, even as he was breaking out the healing item. The Star Atomizer released Photon-charged mist into the air, settling over the four hunters in a shimmering cloud that instantly restored their bodies to a full, undamaged state whether organic or mechanical. Not for the first time, Lyon thought that Ryland might well have a point when he claimed that Photon energy was the same force that ancient civilizations had called "magic." How else to explain that the atomizer could somehow read its user's intentions and only heal Gowan and his allies while having no effect on the soldiers in its radius of effect?

Freed from the need to keep up with the Restas, at least for the moment, Ryland immediately hurled another Gizonde at the Baranz without even getting back to his feet. The lightning was too much for the missile platform; it was blown to bits. The bolt arced through to the second Baranz, which Ryland hit with another technique, and a third, bringing it down as well as Naomi cut the shock troopers off from him. The chain lightning had gone on to blast into the troops behind the Baranzes as well, through it hadn't done as much damage as the earlier Rafoie, as Ryland's proficiency with the technique was offset by the soldiers' better resistance to lightning. They might have planned ahead, Ryland thought, for exactly that, using an equipment loadout that prioritized them not getting caught in the splash damage. After all, the Baranzes were the obvious targets for the hunters to fight first.

There didn't appear to be a Force present, but one of the women in the back used Resta, supporting her squad. Next to her was a man Ryland suspected was the leader; while his blue-and-green armor was the same as the other soldiers, his gold beret made him stand out.

 _This is it_ , he thought. _This is the one we have to bring down._

~X X X~

"This isn't good, Colonel," Lieutenant Vallis said even as she directed fire from her beam at the RAcast. "Both Baranzes are out, and Corbett's down as well."

"Wescote! Jeffers! Mayne!" Zanov sapped. "Close and support!"

The three soldiers he'd named charged ahead. While the Baranzes hadn't taken out any of the hunters, they _had_ allowed the three shock troopers to get past the androids and the others soldiers to get near. Now the three troops Zanov had called on switched their rifles for Photon sabers, gold-hued gladiuses, and fell on the hunters in close combat.

It was a plain numbers game, eight to four, and it would virtually be eight to three if they got to the Force, who not only likely had his profession's usual lack of hand-to-hand training but didn't even wield a rod or cane for basic hand-to-hand defense.

They could still win this.

They _had_ to win this.

~X X X~

Lyon put away her Varista and readied her gungnir as she saw the three soldiers charging. She had to step out from cover to block their way, which immediately drew the attention of one of the remaining gunners. She put two shots into Lyon, but the damage was minor at worst.

 _Even so, I can't hold them off forever, not getting shot like this and fighting three soldiers besides._

She swept the partisan in a quick arc, its Photon blade sending up sparks when it struck against the fields of their armor, then executed a sharp reversal and lashed out again. The soldiers were already in motion, though, trying to flank her, so that only the woman in the middle was hit. The man to Lyon's left took a fireball to the face from Ryland as he tried to get around her that blasted him off his feet, while Lyon half-spun to finish her combination strike against the one to her right.

She never finished that move, though. Her timing was perfect; she would have cut off his charge, forced him to at the least dodge or parry her attack—except that the woman who'd been shooting her put another round on target, jolting Lyon just as she moved so that the android took a slash right across the torso from the flanking soldier's gladius. He struck again, hitting the side of her head, and in desperation she launched a confusion trap and flung herself to her left.

"Gowan!" she called for his support again, and he stood up and shot the trap's detonator, setting it off before its timer counted down. The soldiers staggered, their balance and coordination suddenly warped, their vision spinning out of control.

~X X X~

 _Damn it!_ Zanov thought, even as he was firing at the RAcast who'd broken cover to help his ally. His shots smashed home, inflicting significant damage, but the problem was that with the Force still up and fighting anything they did was liable to be temporary, anyway. Even as he watched, the chances of getting to Donovan Ryland went down further, as the HUnewearl cut down Corporal Lightner, leaving her one-on-one with Lawson. The outcome of that fight wasn't particularly in doubt. And Wescote wasn't getting up, either; the Foie had taken him down, hard.

It was time for their last resort.

"Marks!" he barked. "Bring down the house."

"Yes, sir!"

The sergeant put away her rifle and unslung the massive Panzerfaust she'd had strapped across her back. The rocket launcher was a crude weapon at the best of times, but crude was what was called for just then, in Zanov's opinion.

Especially since the target he was pointing at wasn't the enemy hunters, but the rock overhang that covered the area where the test machine was located. If he couldn't get past the hunters, well, he would just have to take out the entire nook and let a few tons of rock settle the matter for them.


	13. Chapter 13

Ryland saw the soldier swing the Panzerfaust around, bracing the massive weapon against her hip. He had a pretty good idea what she was meaning to do, and extended a hand, beginning to summon up the power to blast her with a technique before she could fire. Unfortunately, her companions had the same idea: the commanding officer and the woman by his side in what he assumed was an officer's uniform both fired their guns at him. The blasts splashed against his frame, penetrating with bruising force as if he'd been punched hard, twice, but the important part was that it jolted him, disrupting his ability to summon the technique, giving their squadmate the time she needed.

Gowan was already helping Lyon, his aim offline, so that he wouldn't be able to swing around in time. The women didn't even have ranged weapons equipped and Naomi was still fighting her last opponent so wouldn't have the chance for technique use, either.

There was only one chance left, other than trusting that the rock shelf was strong enough to survive the impact, and he could just see the bloom of the smoke and fire from the Panzerfaust's exhaust port as he took it.

~X X X~

Lyon had all but lost track of what was happening on the battlefield around her as she tried to adapt. One of the two soldiers had used Anti to erase the confusion trap's effects, and while she had managed to get back into a defensive position against them they were still doing their level best to reduce her to scrap metal. Of course, she was aware of what was in her peripheral vision—unlike an organic, she couldn't help it—but she was devoting most of her tactical processing power to her immediate situation. Thus, when Ryland's voice barked, "Lyon, trap now!" she had no idea why he was saying it or what he hoped to accomplish.

She just trusted in her partner, and ejected a freeze trap (her default, as it was the most likely to be useful in a random situation).

The roar of the rocket overhead cleared up the question of "what" just in time for her to realize some of what Ryland intended before it happened. The shot didn't hit the trap square-on, but it passed close enough by that both the rocket and the trap's proximity alerts were triggered, giving the Photon warhead a live target in its fire-line, and in the next instant Lyon was blown clean off her feet by the explosion, slamming hard to the packed earth with force that would have left her breathless had she breathed.

The two soldiers she'd been fighting weren't as lucky.

~X X X~

The Photon warhead's detonation was contained, unlike a chemical blast, to its visible area of effect, leaving Zanov, Vallis, and Marks in the somewhat odd position of having their vision blocked by the giant fireball without being caught up in the explosion.

That changed in the next instant, as the rocket explosion was immediately followed up by the Rafoie that the enemy Force had used the rocket blast as cover to prepare. Vallis and Marks were hurled off their feet, while Zanov dropped to one knee. They'd be up again, soon enough, and techniques would cure the injuries, but the pattern was clear: they were in serious trouble.

 _Fine, then_ , Zanov thought, rising to his feet. _If we can't beat them with force…_

He holstered his gun and snatched a weapon that looked like a foot-long rod off his belt. Triggering the Photon driver caused a spike of red light like the blade of a saber to sprout from each end. He spun the Stag Cutlery and yelled, "Come on, then! Which one of you thinks they can match up?"

~X X X~

"What is he, an idiot?" Ryland muttered. He'd burned through too many techniques, too fast, and his resources were down, so he reached for a fluid to restore his mental energy, the reserves of psychic stamina that allowed him to shape Photon into the effects he needed.

"Ego: stereotype," Gowan responded.

"Yeah," Lyon said, getting back to her feet. The android had obviously taken nasty damage, which was why she, too, was relying on healing medicine: an emergency Trimate. "He figures that we hunters have our pride, like big-shot warriors from ancient legends, and it'll give him a chance to fight one of us one-on-one instead of us concentrating our strength."

Gowan shot one of the soldiers Lyon had been fighting that was still twitching, while Naomi got her sword up under her last opponent's daggers to block a downward stab, pushed up to fling his arms out of guard position, and kicked him in the chest. He reeled, and she whipped the oversized blade down in a massive overhand swing that sheared through his armor's defensive fields, carved between its plates, and cut deep into his body. That left only the officer in his gold beret and the two women flanking him. While the hunters had been forced to expend some of their stock of (occasionally expensive) restoration medicines, they'd shattered the attack to the point that they now outnumbered the enemy.

Ryland used another Resta on himself and Naomi.

"Well, we know what to do about that."

Lyon nodded, even though the gesture was pointless when she was facing away from him and talking over a communications link; it was merely a programmed reflex.

"Yes, we do."

She put away her gungnir and drew the Durandal, the Photon saber gleaming bright in her hand.

"We give him what he wants."

She started walking towards the leader with a slow, measured pace. No one else moved; the shooters didn't fire at her.

"Query: purpose?"

"I think what Gowan's trying to say is, what are you, nuts? We could bring them down now with gunfire and techniques before they even get close," Naomi was even less measured in her questioning.

"No, she knows what she's doing," Ryland countered. And he was right. Maybe it was just how his mind worked, or maybe it was because they were partners, and while the two pairs worked together as a team fairly often, Gowan and Naomi were fundamentally different people, with a different approach to their jobs that suited their personal priorities, their beliefs.

"If we can take him alive," Lyon said, "it's hard evidence of what he was up to. He's the one calling the shots, the one who can be forced to testify. There need to be consequences for these military goons putting the wellbeing of the ship's population at risk for the sake of _politics_. If we just bombard them, he could Ryuker or telepipe away and let his subordinates rot. They don't have the whole story, they might even be fanatical enough to keep quiet, and they're not enough to _force_ the military's hand.

"This guy is, and we're going to feed him to Irene and Milarose."

"Just be careful," Ryland told her. "We'll keep the other two off of you, but watch out. Most military high-rankers are expert fighters, not desk jockeys, and he'll want to take at least one of us down with him, plus it's _his_ best chance to thin our numbers if he's going to find a way to pull this out."

That was, of course, the down side to going along with the confrontation.

A number of bantering remarks were possible, but her personality matrix returned a much simpler reply to Ryland's statement as being appropriate to the time and situation.

"Thanks."

She stopped directly in front of the gold-bereted officer, about eight feet away, and raised her sword in a kind of salute. This close, she could see a colonel's rank insignia on his uniform where it peeked out from beneath his armor.

"Shall we?" she said.

His only response was to attack at once, lunging forward with his Stag Cutlery. One end of the double saber swept down from Lyon's upper left, and she parried with her Durandal, then the colonel twisted his wrists and spun the other end of his weapon around in a low cut at her ankles. She stepped back with her right leg while at the same time pivoting her body away from the attack and counterstruck, breaking the smoothness of the colonel's combination by making him block to carry her thrust away from him, but he turned the parry into a riposte and scored along the skirt-like projection of her carapace over her hips. She'd been expecting it, though, and willingly accepted the minor damage to strike at the Stag Cutlery's weakest point, his hands where they gripped its center, making him disengage by retreating a step.

The first exchange had told her that Ryland's apprehension was well-founded: the colonel _was_ a skilled fighter and good with the weapon. In open ground like this where the wielder had the ability to use his full range of motion, the double saber was one of the most devastating weapons in a hand-to-hand fighter's arsenal, not least because its patterns of attack and defense were so different than any other weapon, a mixed blend of sword and spear.

Lyon, though, had one advantage that most Rangers would not have had in her place: she'd used to use one herself. Her primary weapon had once been a Twin Brand before it had been destroyed in the course of a mission in late 3085, and she had a full suite of combat data built on experience from the weapon's other side which she could now turn against her enemy.

That didn't mean, she found, that she could predict every move of the Stag Cutlery, but she knew what kinds of strikes she could parry, either with her saber or forearm-mounted shield, and what she was better off evading with movement, because she knew what kinds of moves each could flow into. The double saber was at its best when the colonel could chain together strings of offensive and defensive maneuvers with little pause, and breaking these combinations was Lyon's best tactic.

He hit her twice more, once another graze on her upper left arm and once a more serious strike to her waistline that did actual damage. He'd fooled her, then, got her to defend her leg, a higher-priority target because it would hamper her movement if damaged, and struck over her guard to breach her armor and carapace. Thankfully the damage was minor, her structural integrity not harmed and the nerve-like data channels able to have their load rerouted, but it still worried her as he came at her again.

 _He has experience fighting androids_ , she concluded. _He knows the kind of decisions we make, the way we prioritize matters—and where our vulnerabilities differ from an organic person's_.

But that kind of realization helped her, too, she knew, finding an example in the way she broke up his next combination by recognizing an apparent overhead feint at her head as an actual strike, slipping it with a step-in and scoring off his shoulder, leaving the armor plate there compromised with a webwork of cracks. Each exchange of blows gave her updated data, letting her know what he knew and so better able to predict this man specifically instead of a generic opponent.

Of course, that worked for him as well, as they came together again in a clash of whirling, flashing Photon blades. He hit her twice more, getting both upper arms, the left one solidly enough that the damage was sufficient to cause a 16% drop in mobility. Her combat algorithms updated on the fly to account for the damage, keeping her from attempting futile shield blocks that would have worked in her uninjured state, but it still reduced her moveset, limited her options.

Lyon used her enemy's organic nature against him, though, striking out at his head. Though a harder target to hit than the body due to its size and relative ease of movement, the head was still the core of most organics' perception of their "humanity," and it took a huge level of calm to not absolutely prioritize defense when a Photon blade was lashing out at the seat of one's eyes and brain. She didn't expect that a man who'd just seen most of his squad cut down while on a last-ditch desperation mission would have that calm.

As it turned out, she was wrong.

Rather than parry her second strike, the colonel slipped the attack by juking his head to one side and came back in under her weapon arm, hitting her in almost the exact spot on her right side that he'd hit before. This time the injury was more than just cosmetic; the structural damage was enough to hamper her ability to turn and pivot, while the extent of data rerouting would actually cause a drop in efficiency, even if the delay could be measured in microbeats.

He had her on the defensive, now, pressing his attack with the awareness that any riposte would be badly limited by her need to protect herself. At some point, Ryland would step in with a Resta to bail her out, and that would signal the end of the duel. Lyon wouldn't complain about that choice—bringing the military to justice wasn't more important to her than her life, as she was a hunter rather than a crusader with a cause—but she didn't want it to come to that.

Worse, he might not be _able_ to help; the colonel's allies were fighting defensively, focusing their attempts on making the other hunters stay back. The lieutenant had even traded out her rifle for a second firearm, a launcher that sprayed Photon rounds at multiple targets, good for crowd control. Their entire goal was to make sure that the colonel and Lyon fought one-on-one, and if they pulled it off, there was a genuine risk that Lyon might take damage that no Reverser technique or Medical Center repair work could fix.

The estimated chances of the colonel's escape were rising sharply, the risk of Lyon herself being killed or taking serious damage requiring extensive repair work also now significant. She was desperate, and like she'd tried—and failed—to provoke from her enemy, desperate people took chances.

But she was also an android, and her desperate chances were carefully calculated risks.

The advantage of a double saber was its ability to use its constant stream of movement to strike and defend with both blades relentlessly, weaving a net of lethal energy around its wielder. But in close, it was almost worthless on offense; if she could break that perimeter, she could still win. Of course, the colonel knew his own weapon well, and a bull-rush tactic could be overcome by a number of different strikes.

Which was exactly what Lyon was counting on as she lunged.

She began with a block that overextended her damaged left arm, all but requiring that she step in to follow it. He spotted it, reacted, and launched a triple strike, right-left-right, that would stop her attack and likely end with her taking a blow to her right leg, though probably insubstantial. Except that she did something that almost no organic would have done. After parrying the initial attack to her right side, she didn't try to sidestep the counter. Instead, she turned her left side into the blow, deliberately letting the Stag Cutlery tear into her already damaged upper arm just below the shoulder. It was a clean strike and a savage one, breaching Photon fields and compromised armor before tearing into the arm structure itself, cutting clean through.

But where an organic would have suffered pain, suffered shock to her system, Lyon only noted the critical damage alerts dispassionately, and in the _time_ that cutting through the arm cost the colonel, struck with a perfect short-arm thrust under his chest plate and up into his heart.

He made a little gurgling sound, his eyes going blank, and he slid off Lyon's Durandal to drop to the grass next to her severed arm.

~X X X~

Cleaning up the mess afterwards was largely a matter of routine. With the colonel down, it had taken only a very short time for the hunters to finish the fight; the woman who'd launched the Panzerfaust rocket even surrendered outright once her lieutenant was taken out. They'd slapped technique-suppressing restraints on the soldiers, removed their weapons, gear, and emergency supplies like telepipes, and then Ryland burned through four Reversers, restoring life to clinically deceased troops, including the colonel. Two others hadn't needed it, only having been knocked unconscious, while two more had taken head injuries that caused sufficient brain damage that they were irretrievably dead. After adding Almonte to the stack of prisoners, the hunters waited patiently until Arin had finished his work and secured the test data.

Then all that was left was for Dr. Severin to report to Lab Internal Security.

"If he wanted an opportune time to tell Chief Milarose about the project he was working on, I'd say this would have to qualify," Ryland noted. "Seven military prisoners including Colonel Zanov here caught red-handed interfering with a Lab operation, plus one spy; that's quite a haul." And sure enough, the IntSec agents who took custody of the prisoners were positively ecstatic; Lyon even caught one of them in what she was 74.8% certain was a smile.

Dr. Severin, on the other hand, gave no need for estimates about his reaction when he met with Lyon and Ryland two days later. He was beaming from ear to ear as he sat down. He carried two cups, and passed one to Ryland, who had already gotten his own coffee, the cup still half-full in front of him.

"Dr. Severin, if you ever see me turn down coffee, then you can immediately assume I've been possessed by Dark Falz," the Force said, accepting the cup swiftly as if afraid that it was going to run away without him.

"He's not kidding," Lyon put in. "I've seen him stop for coffee in a firefight."

"You expected me to dodge gunfire without caffeine?"

Severin glanced from one to the other, not entirely sure whether or not he was being kidded, and neither hunter did anything to let him off the hook if it _was_ a joke. The huge smile wavered for only a moment, though, then he pulled out his chair and sat down.

"By the look on your face, I'm going to imitate Ryland, play detective, and deduce that things went well with Chief Milarose?"

"They did indeed. Arin's reconstruction of the test data indicated that the Photon collector is a complete success."

"How did she take the surprise?" Ryland asked.

"Now that is a question I can't answer."

"Classified?" Lyon wondered.

Severin shook his head.

"No, more like founded on fallacious assumptions. I'd explained the experiment, presented her with the data, and she glanced over it, then looked at me, smiled, and said, 'Please give my congratulations to the ARIN system. He does fine work.' You could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, I told you that I was authorized to run tests for my AI development, but—"

"But you didn't expect she'd know all of the specifics, or that he was a production model handling actual project data."

"Exactly."

Ryland drained a good half of what was left in his original cup.

"So no surprise there, and I'm guessing no surprise on the content of your Photon collector, either?"

"She didn't say, but I got that impression. Of course, I could be wrong. Chief Milarose enjoys giving the appearance that she knows everything about everything even when it comes as a complete shock to her—with the result that no one ever knows exactly when she _does_ know everything, and when she's bluffing. If she's ever bluffing. There's that possibility, too."

"But one way or another," Ryland concluded, "you're off the hook for any insubordinate behavior or for exceeding the parameters of your assigned tasks."

"All in the name of justifiable scientific curiosity." His eyes actually seemed to sparkle. "Dr. Montague even wants to look at my work, could you believe it?"

"So how soon can we expect to see giant windmills sprouting all over Ragol?"

He chuckled at that.

"I wouldn't go that far, Lyon. For one thing, we're still in the test phase. We need to build multiple machines, experiment in different environments, try to overcome some of the technical limitations and improve on efficiency. And then again, let's be honest, as long as the monsters on the surface remain a serious, ongoing problem, then industrial-style construction is out of the question."

"Sounds like the price of coffee won't be coming down anytime soon, then."

"I'm afraid not. But in the future, who knows? Weinstine Co. has already started talks with the Lab over licensing the collection technology for future large-scale development."

"Jason Weinstine and Natasha Milarose negotiating a business contract with each other," Ryland mused. "What I wouldn't give for a chance to watch _that_. But really, I'm glad to hear it. I suppose it's too soon for pushback from the anti-independence faction in the Administration? Or have they just had their fangs drawn by the military's preemptive strike?"

Severin sipped from his own cup.

"I couldn't say. Truthfully, I don't know the answer. I haven't been told to clear my calendar to give a presentation to the Council on the point, so Chief Milarose must be running interference. Or, like you say, the other forces are regrouping after you spiked the military's guns."

"No point in associating yourself with a battle that's already been fought and lost," Ryland agreed. "Or else—just maybe—enough of them decided that something that helps _Pioneer 2_ shouldn't be fought even if it does happen to give their political enemies a leg up. You know, do the right thing for their constituents and keep their fundamentally ideological fight to an ideological level of argument?"

Silence greeted this pronouncement for a couple of tenth-beats before all three of them broke into laughter.

"You had me going there for a bit, Ryland," Lyon got out between chortles. "Our leaders not be a bunch of selfish, short-sighted bastards? Most of the time the best we can hope for is that we get _competent_ schemes and plotters."

"But then again, that just gives we hunters the opportunities for work."

"True," Severin agreed. "And for someone in my position, it's good to have found some that I can trust, so here's to a productive partnership in the future."

He raised his cup, and Ryland did the same.

"I'll drink to that. Here's to an entertaining future."

Lyon snatched the third cup. "Why not?" she said. "If we can't count on our government to be useful, we can at least have them keep us from getting bored."

"Hear, hear!" the men approved, and the three coffee cups clicked together in a toast to the future.


	14. Chapter 14

A tropical wind ruffled the leaves of lush palm trees and carried the heady scents of jungle blossoms across the white-sand beach. The sun was high in the sky, and bathed the seashore, setting glittering reflections dancing in the viridian surface of the water and the sand alike. Karen Grahart, stretched out on a lounge chair, wearing a green-and-yellow maillot with a midriff-baring inset, lazily dug the toes of one bare foot into the sand.

"It's good to see the new military administration is using our virtual reality resources productively," Natasha Milarose observed.

Karen tipped her head back and looked up through her sunglasses at the older woman.

"Recreation is considered key to relieving the psychological stress of being on duty, for soldiers and scientists alike." She lifted her glass, which contained a tropical drink the color of the ocean, and invited, "I know you're not dressed for it, but would you care to join me?"

"I can only stay a moment," Milarose said. At a wordless command, a folding beach chair took shape and she sat down.

"It's too bad. I'm not the only one who ought to be celebrating. The Lab is looking very good right now."

"That's certainly true—for now. Dr. Severin's process shows every sign of being a viable way to supplement our Photon energy resources."

"Not to mention the fact that you finally got Commander Valgarde—I should say, _ex_ -Commander Valgarde—out of your hair."

"Hmmm, there is that. Of course, that isn't necessarily a good thing for me."

"Oh? I'm surprised; he'd been butting heads with you ever since we left Coral."

"Quite true." Milarose tapped a painted nail against her lower lip. "But the new Commander Elberg is brighter than Valgarde. Just because he isn't so relentlessly hostile doesn't mean that he isn't a greater threat to my interests in the long run."

"You've heard that he'd been talking to Councillor Grisen, then."

"Exactly. And it seems that he's very interested in decoupling the military from its past alliances, doubtless because he doesn't want to be caught up in the associations that doomed Valgarde and Zanov. In short, either he's figured out the true extent of the military's options, or he's gotten good advice from someone who did."

Karen smiled up at her, then took another sip from her glass.

"I'd think that any military officer worth her stripes would take it as part of her duty to point out that an independent _Pioneer 2_ would face potential threats, not just from Ragolian monsters to be dealt with by hunters or criminal groups to be hunted down by security, but from a hostile Coral, from nations with a massive investment in the Pioneer Project and who might consider coming after what they believe to be theirs."

"And, of course, the presence—or lack thereof—of such a defensive force would be reported back to Coral by the groups maintaining contact with our homeworld."

"Emphasizing the importance of having such defenses in place well before any declaration of independence be made, since Coral would no doubt start preparing any punitive expedition well in advance of any move by us as well," Karen agreed. "Do you know, I think I see your point. Having a man who was so caught up in his _current_ allegiances, that he couldn't anticipate shifting when the wind changes as your opponent had to be a relief for you on some level. It isn't hard to outmaneuver a statue."

Milarose chuckled at that description.

"How apt. And might I ask what our new, more agile Commander has done for the one giving him such good advice?"

"I've been asked to reform Team-00 as a special operations unit, one that reports directly to the Commander."

"Interesting. While the strength of the main military force would be to prepare for a possible future conflict, a spec-ops team would be suited for carrying out a variety of field missions here and now on the military's behalf. It's a position rife with opportunity—and, of course, risk."

Karen didn't have to ask for an explanation. Direct access to Commander Elberg bypassing the chain of command and the opportunity to establish a track record of actual successes in the field would give her the chance to rise in influence. Of course, that also could give rise to envy in others and the chance of failure. When one made an ambitious grab, one risked a hard fall.

But then, one never got anywhere without ambition.

"It is. I've already begun putting it together. There are hunters I know, those who want the structure and support of a permanent position without having to entirely abandon their independence. Special operations work suits the hunter skillset, the kind of thing Colonel Zanov found out the hard way."

"Hm, and will your new employees include those who dealt with that pesky Mr. Solus for you?"

Karen arched an eyebrow.

"I don't know what you mean," she replied easily.

"Well, I'm merely speculating. We know that Zanov didn't have Solus killed; he's far too competent for that. It accomplished nothing for him and merely inspired Mr. Ryland and Ms. Lyon to push harder for answers. Oh, Zanov tried to cover up the circumstances and when it became clear from their presence at the crime scene...how _did_ that timing work out so cleverly, Ms. Grahart? Well, in any case, that prompted Zanov into a series of further short-sighted actions all but designed to guarantee that the hunters would dig up their little scheme and bait the military into something stupid and overt."

"That would have been respectably clever," Karen said. "Prod two sides into coming into conflict, luring one's enemies into destroying themselves. Of course, it would take a certain pragmatic viewpoint to see the life of a criminal who routinely engages in arranging for theft, assault, and occasionally murder as expendable for that end. It's...delicate."

"But, the kind of moral gray area a successful special operations team leader would need to employ. A hunter can pick and choose their work according to their moral principles. An effective government operator has to be more...flexible."

"Well, you would know about flexible ethics in the pursuit of a government job."

"Of course. Why do you think I supported the change? Well, other than the fun of helping Valgarde to his own destruction, of course, but that was just entertainment. No, the real value lies in keeping our options open. However we proceed going forward, I want us to have the ability to make the choice we _want_ , not to back ourselves into a corner and risk finding out that it's the wrong corner to be in."

"You surprise me," Karen said, and meant it.

"I shouldn't. After all, ultimately, it's just a question of whom do you trust. And as my ex-husband will gladly tell you, the person whose judgment I most trust in any situation is my own."

Karen Grahart raised her glass to the older woman.

"Now those, Chief Milarose, are words you took right out of my mouth."

~X X X~

Everything about the ruin spoke of antiquity: the reddish-brown stone columns left bare as paint and plaster had been weathered away by the years, the shattered structures and fallen bridges, the overgrown ivy and moss poking through long-worn cracks in the stonework, the symbolism that hadn't been used by any Coralian culture in centuries and, of course, the way the rising water had all but swallowed the island where the structure stood.

The giant egg, painted with bands of rainbow color, waddling around on clawed feet poking out of the bottom, wiggling the pink wingtips that protruded from holes in the side, didn't really match the décor, especially when Lyon hit it with her Durandal and it flopped over onto its side. Lyon hit it with her Durandal and it flopped over onto its side. But then, virtual reality, by its very nature, was whatever the programmer wanted it to be, and for Easter, the Lab's VR Temple training environment featured occasional appearances by egg Rappies to celebrate the holiday.

She supposed it made more sense than if they'd had blue, pink, and yellow bunnies instead of the Dimenians.

"Did you get it?" Ryland yelled, coming around a corner. The Temple had a lot of mazelike rooms, and the virtual Rappies were just like their real-world cousins on Ragol if you blasted them from long range: they _ran._ This sanity was the first clue that the giant birds hadn't been genetically modified in the same way other hostile native animals were, but its experimental value was rather less important to hunters than the fact that they had to go in close to confront them.

"Yeah, we're good. It pecked me a couple of times, though."

Ryland blinked at her behind his spectacles.

"Um...Lyon, how does it peck when it doesn't have a beak?"

"Hey, take it up with the programmers. _I_ didn't design this thing."

"A fair enough point," he acknowledged.

A couple of tenth-beats ticked by while they patiently watched the fallen Rappy.

"So answer me this," he said. "Exactly why are we here, anyway? I'd have thought after our last job, you'd have wanted to spend your holiday resting."

"Hey, I just had a new left arm put on. There's no way I'm going to be trusting it in real life, I-could-get-killed-out-here combat without giving it a thorough stress-testing under field conditions. VR training is perfect for that." She rotated the arm in a circle by way of illustration.

"Oh, no, that I understand. I just meant, why _today_."

"Well, look at it this way: ever since we came to Ragol on this ship, it's been one disaster after another. First there was the destruction of the _Pioneer 1_ colony, then the discovery of Dark Falz underground, then the revelations about all the shady business that the Pioneer Project has been getting up to rather than trying to save the people of Coral the way it was supposed to, all the intercine rivalries between the government factions on board _this_ ship, Leo Grahart's last little rebellion, and now the resource shortage."

"It's actually kind of depressing when you think about it."

"Uh-huh. But! This time, we helped protect something that one day may help solve the resource problem, make life better for us. And in doing so, we also played a part in getting a couple of hidebound, bloodthirsty, short-sighted military goons removed from their positions of power."

"Not that there aren't plenty more bloodthirsty, sneaky, or generally corrupt people just lining up to take their place."

"True enough; it's going to take a few decades or an open rebellion, maybe both, to flush all the corruption out of the system. There are kids being born today who'll probably be hunters before anything like the paradise we were promised is established here. Again, though, that's not the point. The point is, here and now, today, something happened that was unambiguously good for the ship."

"And?"

The Rappy began to twitch; in another second it hopped to its feet, only to be knocked sprawling by a backhanded slash of Lyon's Durandal. It rolled, got up again, and scrambled away, running for the edge of the area and vanished as soon as it reached the water. Neither hunter even was watching the unrealistic VR programming, since left behind at the place where the Rappy had fallen the second time was another egg, this one much smaller and without the addition of protruding limbs.

Lyon smiled brightly.

"And I thought it'd be a perfect time to go on an egg hunt. Today's the last day, and I feel lucky."

"...An android can 'feel lucky'?"

She winked at him.

"Optimism is just a personality setting to appreciate the possibility of good things happening, after all. For example, I choose to hope that when we cash this in, we'll get a new wok as a prize."

Ryland shook his head, laughing. And why not? Watching an artificial sun send its light sparkling off a simulated ocean, it was easy to see that life wasn't perfect. But there were good things in it, too, people he cared for and things that he could accomplish to make it better.

"You're right," he said, "so if this turns out to be one of those rabbit wands, I'll even use it on our next job. We have to keep that promise of spring alive, after all."

And who knew? Maybe one day, it would be the real sun shining off Ragol's sea for everyone to watch.

~X X X~

 _A/N: It's always a good feeling to finish off a long story, so how much more to finish off a long_ series _of stories? I've been writing about Lyon and Ryland since I first wrote "Trick or Treat" in the fall of 2006 (when it was posted at PSOWorld; the first story to appear at fanfiction-dot-net was "Heartwired" in 2007). The_ Phantasy Star _section isn't the most well-traveled in fiction; on a month-to-month basis, they get fewer hits than nearly anything else I've written, so these characters haven't reached the audience of some of my other fics, and I'm actually sorry about that, because I'm very fond of this partnership, and I'm very happy that I was able to take them through all of the special holiday sets that appeared on the PSO servers. Hopefully, those of you who are reading this will have enjoyed the ride as well. And I have to thank the creators of_ Phantasy Star Online _for creating a world in which a philosophical android could team up with a mystery-loving wizard on board a colony spaceship and fight the minions of an evil god. And argue over coffee._

 _Incidentally, as some of you may have suspected, I was indeed hinting at one of my fan theories (or "headcanons," as the young'uns call it these days *wink* ) that the past history alluded to in-game between Tyrell and Milarose is that Natasha is the Principal's ex-wife and therefore the mother of Red Ring Rico. Any slurs on Karen Grahart's character, incidentally, are purely my own!_

 _Lastly, since this is the series finale, I wanted to slip in a little something special to leave you with, namely, an omake! I posted this to PSOWorld back in 2007, but it's never made a fanfiction-dot-net appearance (and hey, who remembers fanfics from 2007, anyway?), so enjoy!_

~X X X~

 **A Birthday Performance**

 **July, AUW 3087**

The residence unit looked like a tornado had touched down inside it, concluded Weinstine Co. Android L/Y-906 (Lyon). The blast on the surface of the planet Ragol that had wiped out the thirty thousand colonists of _Pioneer 1_ hadn't wreaked as much havoc to the physical structures. But that's what happened, she supposed, when a couple of dozen hunters threw a party.

"Well," said Donovan Ryland as he surveyed the mess, "this was certainly a...memorable...birthday." The red-haired, bespectacled Force was both the owner of the residence and the object of the party.

"Maybe we should have had the celebration at my residence?" Lyon considered. Like most androids, she had very little in the way of bric-a-brac in her own home, which was essentially a space to keep her recharge pod.

"It would just have meant I'd have had to carry all these gifts back to here," Ryland said, nodding to the surprisingly large pile of presents which had gone untouched by trash, spills, or general damage. Hunters were, after all, masters of _controlled_ mayhem.

"And Justine would still have managed to spill wine on your dress at my home." Like most human Forces, Ryland's clothing was styled to resemble an ancient wizard's robes. He considered himself a spiritual successor to those who once had wielded "magic"—what he believed they now called the Photon energy which drove their society.

"Fashion advice from a woman whose carapace is built to look like a maid's outfit in pumpkin orange?" he said dryly.

"Ah, but at least unlike you organics, we androids don't eat, and therefore don't spill."

"A telling point."

"Which reminds me. I still have my gift to give you."

Lyon walked into the kitchen and fished out a brightly wrapped package from the cupboard where she'd secured it. She returned and set it on the table.

"Happy birthday, Ryland."

"Thank you, Lyon." He untied the green ribbon, then tore off the sparkly silver paper. Inside the wrapping was an Auto-Pak box; he tapped the corner tab and it fell open to reveal...a hat?

"A hat?" he repeated aloud. Specifically, it was a synthetic-silk top hat, black in color, with a violet hatband, sitting brim up.

"Look inside, silly."

Ryland reached into the hat and, encountering something, pulled it out.

 _*meep*,_ the Mag chirped happily, wriggling its nose.

"It's been fed up already," Lyon explained, "to synchronize it with your mental power and to augment the defensive power of your Photon frame."

Ryland scratched the Mag behind its long, white ears. It was an ultra-rare model of the little support biomachines, a Soniti, which couldn't be bought but had to be hunted for in the field.

"This is incredibly thoughtful, Lyon; you must have worked for hours to get this for me." The Soniti wriggled its nose again, pleased with the scratching. "Thank you so much."

"You're welcome; I'm glad you like it."

"I'm curious, though. Why the hat?"

Lyon laughed.

"Oh, that was for my sake. I just wanted to see it with my own eyes."

"A hat?" Ryland still didn't quite get it.

"A magician pulling a rabbit-Mag out of one."


End file.
